Farmers carry bags of corn on their shoulders as they walk through a corn plantation in Pailin province in northwestern Cambodia.This area, including the hills in the background, has been cleared of forests to make way for plantations, raising concern about land degradation in the future.

 

It was another corn harvesting season in Pailin, a northwestern province in Cambodia. Nuon Thol’s face lit up with a big smile as he joined his family in the harvest.

 

“This plantation has regularly generated me the income that I need to support my family and the education of my four children,” the 50-year-old man said, recalling how he managed to turn what used to be forest land into a five-hectare farm over the past eight years.

Pailin, which was a war zone during and after the Khmer Rouge era, is today a major agricultural frontier. Corn, bean and cassava farms are the main lifeline for many of its residents.

But these benefits have come at a cost to the environment. Concerns are growing about land degradation as forests are cut down to make way for plantations.

“The main cause of the loss of forest is the increase in the number of the population. We now have 70,000 residents, a seven-fold increase in a 10-year period,” Pailin’s deputy governor Ieng Vuth explained.

As part of the 1996 peace deal with the government, the former Khmer Rouge guerrillas continued to govern Pailin while being integrated with mainstream society. Until then, gem stone mining was their main economic activity. Now, people living in the area have shifted to agriculture by clearing and burning forest to grow cash crops.

“There are now approximately 40,000 hectares of plantation, meaning that forest cover of the same size has already been destroyed,” Ieng Vuth said.

During the past decade Pailin has seen its forest fast disappearing across flat land and smaller hills. Now forest cover on big mountains is starting to recede. Pailin is an example of how pervasive the issue of deforestation is becoming in the country.

The extent of the problem was discussed in a recent meeting between provincial officials and visiting Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries staff who manage the UNDP-supported Sustainable Land Management Project. The visit was part of a wider effort to build a comprehensive look into causes of land degradation which is seen as a threat to Cambodia’s agriculture and natural resources in the future.

Addressing land degradation is a major component in the National Action Plan that the government, with UNDP’s assistance, is preparing as part of its obligation under the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification. The plan will become a strategic tool to seek funding to tackle the problem and outline activities to educate farmers about farming techniques that will ensure sustainability of land use and productivity.

But it’s not just deforestation that is contributing to land degradation in Pailin - farming practices are equally problematic. To save money, farmers prefer herbicide to hiring extra hands to remove weeds and grass to boost yield. Over time this degrades soil quality. Additionally, many fields stretch across hilly terrain.  Farmers usually plough them in up-and-down lines instead of across the slopes – a technique experts say makes it easy for top soil to wash down in rainy season into rivers such as the Sangker River, which then feed into the Tonle Sap lake, the largest freshwater lake in Southeast Asia. According to SLM project consultant Tan Boun Suy, this can cause silt build-up and significant long term effects especially for downstream provinces.

“Soil erosion from forest clearing here would make the lake become shallower. But the people in Pailin will be the first to be affected by the consequences [of deforestation] before other areas. Another impact from deforestation will be on biodiversity,” he said.

Sao Chhong, a 47-year-old farmer, has in the past five years noticed a steady decline in his corn yield – from seven to three tonnes per hectare. It’s an experience shared by other local farmers, who say the soil is becoming less fertile due partly to herbicide.

For Sao Chhong, who heads a village self-help group, this is a wake-up call. With his group he has been trying to let others know about farming techniques he learnt during a recent trip to neighbouring Thailand, such as plowing across contour lines and switching crops every few years to allow for soil quality regeneration.

“It is time to start changing from business as usual, and we also need to have more agricultural extension from the government,” he said.

Aside from farming extension, Ieng Vuth said another focus of his administration was in preventing more loss of the green on the mountain range in Pailin’s western part otherwise the province would become “a virtual desert.”

It is a warning which can resonate with other parts of Cambodia with similar problems. Protecting the forest means preserving the ecosystem productivity that the rural poor depend on. It will also contribute to the environmental, economic and social well-being of the country that the SLM project, through UNDP’s support, aims to achieve.