Almost all of the problems that we hear about in Cambodia such as child-malnutrition, infant mortality, death from preventable diseases or mothers dying during child birth are symptoms of the same problem - poverty. The right to be properly fed as a child, the right to give birth without a significant risk of death and the right to not be struck down often before your fifth birthday by preventable disease are the most fundamental of human rights and eclipse all others.
Cambodia has made HUGE economic gains in the last 10 years, and all of us who have been here long enough don’t even need to read a report to know the results, we can see with our own eyes the massive improvement this positive economic change has bought to the lives of millions of Cambodians.
If the pace of development continues at its current rate Cambodia could become a middle income country within the next twenty years. It’s not so long ago that if someone even made such a suggestion they would have been made a laughing stock, but now one only needs to look out of their Phnom Penh window to not only know that it’s possible, but that it’s actually already happening in pockets of Cambodia and spreading out fast from the capital to provincial centers.
The problem now though is that Cambodia has already picked most of its low hanging fruit. To continue near double digit growth the country needs to become more efficient and more productive in order to increase economic output. For this to happen Cambodia needs modernise its infrastructure, increase the annual agricultural yield, monetise its natural resources and continue its construction boom. These things aren’t easy challenges for any developing country, but for Cambodia land issues make them particularly challenging.
I think Cambodia is in an impossible position when it comes to land issues. Cambodia’s situation is unique, the Khmer Rouge destroyed all land records and then in the chaotic decades that followed their demise the various powers were too busy fighting a civil war to frankly care where people were putting their houses or farms.
A situation where people were not prevented from settling and building houses in the road reserves of national highways, on state land, or along (or even over) railway lines should have never been allowed to occur, but the fact of the matter is that it did occur and that leaves us with the impossible question of what to do about it?
There is no easy answer, for the government its a case of being damned if you do, damned if you don’t.
Option 1 (Fair Failure): You allow people to stay on state land, on road reserves, over railways, you cancel projects, you turn away foreign investment and Cambodia’s impressive economic growth stalls. The people on the land are happy today, but their children and the children of millions of other families across the country face the prospect of Cambodia never being anything but a low income basket case with most families living hand to mouth as subsistence farmers.
Option 2 (Unfair Success): You subscribe to the East Asian model of economic development where its all about the destination rather than the journey, the top 5% accumulate massive wealth and aren’t afraid to spend it, the trickle down effect then lifts millions out of poverty. A system where the suffering and hardships faced by the minority of people who were unfortunate enough to be in the way of economic development is justified by the many more who will benefit from the GDP growth in the years to come.
Option 3 (The Fairy Tale): Of course you will always have the dreamers who are deluded into thinking that the soft, warm aura of idealism is a match for the cold, hard armor of economics. They will call for legislation that ensures compensation even if the person is illegally on the land (for however long). This sounds nice, but basically has the same effect as the first option, the government doesn’t have the funds to pick up the tab so it must be passed on the investor, for whom the ROI no longer make sense for a higher risk investment so they’re no longer interested.
At the moment the government as we all know is subscribing to the second option, and in the absence of a better option, I have to say that I agree. I would love to believe there was a way that a country can develop in a fair and inclusive way from the bottom up, but as the numerous disastrous experiments in this model have proven over the last hundred years, it’s not only impossible, it is in most cases disastrous. Cambodia being a case in point, it was such an experiment that lead Cambodia in it’s current state of affairs.
As Westerns we like to take the morel high ground and pass down our pearls of wisdom regarding democracy, freedom of speech, right to assembly and other ‘luxury grade’ human rights. But the fact of the matter is that the path to the economic success of our homelands made what’s going on in modern day Cambodia look like some kind of Utopian fairy tale. We stole entire countries and continents and wiped them clean of their natural resources, enslaved millions and drove numerous ethnic groups to the brink of annihilation.
All of us today are still benefiting from the biblical level suffering that our past generations handed out, so before we go giving advise from the comfort of our privileged western lifestyles, we should ask ourselves whether or not we would be willing to sacrifice that lifestyle and all of those comforts in order to assist people who are experiencing such hardships today at the hands of modern day oppressors. No….? I didn’t think so.
It breaks my heart when I read stories of families being evicted from their homes, I can’t even begin to imagine how terrible that situation must be. But I try to raise my thinking above the level of emotion and strive to be a realist and a pragmatist and as such I understand that this is the lesser of the two evils and that Cambodia must follow the only path that’s been proven to lead a country away from poverty and all of it’s horrific symptoms - economic growth, at any cost.
