As Cambodia emerges from the shadows of a destructive dictatorship, building an empowered citizenry is vital to its future as a progressive and democratic society. Food security, market access, and asset creation are basic concerns in this process of empowerment. In a country where 80 percent of the population is in the rural areas and 66 percent depends on rice farming, it is in the rice farming communities where the most important changes must take place.
Agronomist YANG SAING KOMA is at the center of these changes. The son of a teacher-farmer in Cambodia’s Takeo province, KOMA was old enough to experience the terrible dislocations under the Khmer Rouge regime when his family was forced to leave their province for Phnom Penh. He was fortunate, however, after the regime’s fall, to go on scholarship to Germany where he specialized in agriculture and earned a doctorate at the University of Leipzig in 1995. Returning to Cambodia, he worked for foreign development organizations but knew that he had to find a way to be free to pursue his own priorities; he firmly believed that “Cambodians need to take responsibility for their own destiny.”
Championing sustainable agriculture, KOMA founded in 1997 the Cambodian Center for Study and Development in Agriculture (CEDAC), with a team of seven and the help of a French non-government organization. Its early years were difficult as KOMA struggled to make CEDAC an independent, self-sustaining organization, but his single-minded determination paid off. Today, fifteen years later, CEDAC has become the largest agricultural and rural development NGO in Cambodia.
The linchpin of CEDAC’s success was its introduction of the System of Rice Intensification (SRI), an ecologically sustainable approach to rice production. SRI is based on a simple system of plant, water, and soil management, and is suitable to Cambodia’s dominant pattern of smallholder farms. KOMA introduced SRI in 2000 to twenty-eight reluctant farmers; since then, he has painstakingly promoted SRI so that it gradually spread to more than 100,000 rice farmers, registering a 61 percent increase in rice yields, even as it decreased the amount of seeds and chemical fertilizers used while increasing the use of organic fertilizers by 85 percent. In 2005, the Cambodian government officially endorsed SRI as a rice production strategy. Today, CEDAC is supporting 140,000 farmer families in twenty-one provinces. Between 2002 and 2010, Cambodia’s rice production rose from 3.82 million tons to 7.97 million tons, and CEDAC’s work has been credited as the major factor in this increase.
Recognizing the need for rice farmers to share knowledge among themselves, CEDAC established in 2003 the Farmer and Nature Net (FNN), an independent network of 1,402 farmer associations with around 40,000 members in all. Calling this a “mind net,” KOMA organized FNN to promote sustainable agricultural practices, women engagement in agriculture, and marketing and savings cooperatives. Today, the associations under the FNN have been able to mobilize savings of more than US$8 million, with an average monthly increase of 5 percent.
In 2008, KOMA initiated CEDAC Enterprise for Development (CESDE), subsequently renamed Sahakreas CEDAC (SKC), a social enterprise that addresses predatory market conditions by linking farmers directly to the market. By selling only organic products, KOMA explains, “SKC also links the responsible farmer to the responsible consumer.” To date, CESDE runs a chain of thirteen shops that sell only locally produced, organic agricultural products. It is supporting over 5,000 farmers in eight provinces and has already begun to export organic rice.
All this has been accomplished through a “bottom-up” approach that does not impose a pre-set formula but allows farmers to discover by themselves a better way of doing things. “The challenge,” KOMA says, “lies in building people. We have to believe in ourselves, we have to believe in our ideas.” Asked what this means for Cambodia, he avers: “Everything is interrelated. A simple thing can have a lot of influence on the system. If more people grow, society will grow.”
In electing YANG SAING KOMA to receive the 2012 Ramon Magsaysay Award, the board of trustees recognizes his creative fusion of practical science and collective will, that has inspired and enabled vast numbers of farmers in Cambodia to become more empowered and productive contributors to their country’s economic growth.