Challenging Post-Conflict Environments: Sustainable Agriculture by Alpaslan Özerdem & Rebecca Roberts

Author:Alpaslan Özerdem & Rebecca Roberts [Özerdem, Alpaslan & Roberts, Rebecca]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Peace, Political Science
ISBN: 9781317168737
Google: mQoGDAAAQBAJ
Goodreads: 30000726
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2016-04-15T00:00:00+00:00

Country Background: Geography, Agriculture and Conflicts

The Kingdom of Cambodia, more commonly referred to as Cambodia, is a South-East Asian country that borders Thailand to the west and north-west, Laos to the north-east, Vietnam to the east, and the Gulf of Thailand to the south-west. The capital of Cambodia is Phnom Penh, and the official language and script is Khmer. With an area of 181,035 square kilometres, the country is crossed by the Mekong River, with a lake in the middle called Tonlé Sap. Agriculture has long been the most important economic sector, with rice being the principal crop. Cambodia’s primary export is garments, although it has attempted to make inroads with livestock, and may someday export natural gas and crude oil, market conditions permitting. Like many other agriculture-oriented nations, Cambodia’s agricultural exports are rice, fish, timber and rubber with little added value. This means that after harvest, almost nothing is done to these items in terms of additional processing or packaging so as to give them a competitive edge in the marketplace. As a norm, products with added value command higher prices.

Because the Cambodian territory is nestled in among Laos, Thailand and Vietnam, in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries it experienced a series of wars with neighbouring kingdoms. Later, from 1841 to 1845, the Siamese–Vietnamese War ended with an agreement to place Cambodia under joint suzerainty. By 1863, King Norodom, who is credited for saving the country from disappearing altogether, sought the protection of France from the Thai and Vietnamese, after tensions grew between them. After 90 years of colonialism, on 9 November 1953 Cambodia gained independence from France. After a series of internal power struggles, American B-52s bombed Cambodia to the tune of five Hiroshimas and Nagasakis in an effort to disrupt the Viet Cong and Khmer Rouge between 1969 and 1973. The darkest period of Cambodia was 1975 to 1979 when the Khmer Rouge exercised its communist-led authoritarian power that resulted in the death of nearly two million people or a quarter of the population.9 The killing of the productive labour force plunged the country into agricultural decline.

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