They will need land! The current land tenure situation and future land allocation needs of smallholder farmers in Cambodia

The objective of this background paper is to provide a succinct description of the land tenure situation in Cambodia and, on that basis, discuss the needs smallholder farmers have for land, projected up to the year 2030. The main problem it examines lies at the intersection between, on one hand, the demographic increase in the rural smallholder population and its associated need for land in the future (the demand side) and, on the other hand, the possibility offered by the different land tenure regimes to meet this demand (the supply side); the central question focuses on how supply can meet demand.By looking first at how much land is available under different categories (the supply side), the paper succinctly presents and maps the different land tenure regimes with updated statistics and discusses their main outcomes and shortcomings. On that basis, we present a preliminary assessment of land distribution by main land tenure systems in Cambodia. The land under cultivation by smallholders represents 19 percent of the total area of the national territory and is itself sub-divided into agricultural land with land titles (systematic land registration, 6 percent and land covered by the Order 01, 6 percent), under Social Land Concession arrangements (1 percent) and untitled (6 percent). The forest cover includes forest concessions (10 percent), Community Forestry (2 percent), Protected Areas and Protection Forests (20 percent) and an unclassified forest cover area (14 percent). Economic Land Concessions under operation represent 12 percent while cancelled concessions represent 2 percent of the total territory. The actual tenure of a large non-forested area (14 percent) remains undetermined and further updates are needed to shed light on this issue. The paper suggests that the central problem of the current Cambodian land reform is its ineffectiveness in coordinating the processes of land rights security and formalization in lowland and upland areas, although both regions are closely linked through land-driven migration movements that have intensified over the past 20 years. This has been particularly contentious given the fact that in a parallel process, and driven by a strong, state-based political economy, large land deals have been concentrated in the uplands of the entire country along processes that are exclusionary in nature. The overlap of competing land claims has created a widespread conflict situation in all uplands region of the country. By looking at how much land is needed for family farmers in the future (the demand side), the paper anticipates the land requirements of smallholder farmers by 2030 based on the projected demographic increase in the economically active population in rural Cambodia and on two sets of scenarios i) the transfer of unskilled labour from the agricultural to the secondary and tertiary sectors (industries and services) and ii) the provision of land for smallholder farmers. The analysis suggests that by the year 2030, the transfer of unskilled labour from agriculture to the secondary and tertiary sectors will lag behind the demographic increase in the active rural population. With 2015 as a baseline, the scenarios suggests that by 2030 smallholder farmers will need an additional land area ranging from 320,600 ha (+10 percent in relation to the actual area at the present time) to 1,962,400 (+64 percent), with an average desirable scenario of 1,622.000 ha based on an allocation of 1ha per active labourer (in accordance with the present social concession policy) and on the continuation of the present transfer rate of unskilled manpower from agriculture to the secondary and tertiary sectors (i.e. the transfer of 40.000 workers per year). So the question that needs to be formulated does not revolve around whether or not the rural population will need land in the future, but rather around how this can occur. Along these lines, the paper discusses different options, which are not mutually exclusive, to allocate this land without further impact on the forest cover: i) by redistribution of land from cancelled Economic Land Concessions, ii) through a firmer recognition of swidden agriculture inside Protected Areas, iii) through a far more ambitious Social Land Concession programme and iv) through further reform of the forest concession system. The paper concludes by stressing the need for relevant ministries to engage in open and constructive research-based discussion so that these options can materialize into concrete actions

Recent land dynamics in the Tonle Sap Flood Plain and its impacts on the local communities

Peer reviewe

Developing a Spatial Planning Framework for Sustainable Land and Natural Resources Management. A perspective from Battambang Province, Cambodia

Peer reviewe

The peasants in turmoil: Khmer Rouge, state formation and the control of land in northwest Cambodia

Over the past 15 years, northwest Cambodia has seen dramatic agrarian expansion away from the central rice plain into the peripheral uplands fuelled by peasant in-migration. Against this background, we examine the nature of relations between the peasantry and the state. We first show the historical continuities of land control processes and how the use of violence in a post-conflict neoliberal context has legitimised ex-Khmer Rouge in controlling land distribution. Three case studies show the heterogeneity of local level sovereignties, which engage the peasants in different relations with authority. We examine how these processes result in the construction of different rural territories along the agricultural frontier and argue that, in this region of Cambodia, the struggles between Khmer Rouge and neoliberal modes of land control are central to state formation processes

A multi-scale flood vulnerability assessment of agricultural production in the context of environmental change: The case of the Sangkae River watershed, Battambang province

peer reviewedFlooding on Cambodian land use systems is not a new phenomenon but its significance has increased in the context of global environmental changes. This study aims to assess the vulnerability of agricultural production to floods in the Sangkae River watershed in Battambang province, Northwestern Cambodia. The study was conducted in conjunction with the provincial spatial planning team hosted by the Provincial Department of Land Management and can be viewed as a first step toward a flood management decision-making tool for provincial authorities. The assessments rest on specific dimensions of vulnerability (exposure, sensitivity and adaptive capacity) at different levels in a multi-scale framework: spatial scale (watershed, commune and household); temporal scale (decade, year and season); and institutional scale (national policy, provincial operating rules and communal agencies). The analysis rests on triangulation of qualitative and quantitative data (time-series rainfall data, land use systems, participatory flood mapping, commune workshops (n=31), social-economic statistical databases, in-depth interviews with relevant institutions (n=5) and household surveys (n=162). Intensification of rainfall since the 1920s has increased the risk of flooding in the Sangkae River watershed during the late rainy season, particularly in the upstream area. Using an indicator-based approach, we discovered that the vulnerability of communes is highly dependent on the agro-ecology of land use systems. The household assessment reveals the variability of adaptive capacity between households according to their food security status and income portfolio. Agricultural innovation and structural adaptation to flood are scarce; the households mostly cope with flood through credit, external aid and de-capitalization (sale of household assets). These coping mechanisms adopted by farmers do not reduce vulnerability but reinforce it.The application of this assessment methodology provides nested pictures of vulnerability at different levels and scales and we argue that a dialogue between these levels and scales is necessary to understand the nature of the vulnerability and to act to reduce it. Using these different typologies of vulnerability, this approach enables recommendations to be formulated to reduce vulnerability through better horizontal and vertical integration of institutions and agencies, and effective collective action

Fragmented Territories: Incomplete Enclosures and Agrarian Change on the Agricultural Frontier of Samlaut District, North-West Cambodia

peer reviewedIn Cambodia, the interactions between large-scale land investment and land titling gathered particular momentum in 2012–13, when the government initiated an unprecedented upland land titling programme in an attempt to address land tenure insecurity where large-scale land investment overlaps with land appropriated by peasants. This paper is based on a spatially explicit ethnography of land rights conducted in the Samlaut district of north-west Cambodia – a former Khmer Rouge resistance stronghold – in a context where the enclosures are both incomplete and entangled with post-war, socially embedded land tenure systems. We discuss how this new pattern of fragmentation affects the prevailing dynamics of agrarian change. We argue that it has introduced new forms of exclusion and a generalized perception of land tenure uncertainty that is managed by peasants through the actualization of hybrid land tenure arrangements borrowing from state rules and local consensus. In contrast with common expectations about land formalization, the process reinforces the patterns of social differentiation initiated by land rent capture practices of early migrants and pushes more vulnerable peasants into seeking wage labour and resorting to job migration