Arnim Scheidel, Mario Giampietro and Jesús Ramos-Martin
Land Use Policy, Vol 34 (2013)
Cambodia is currently experiencing profound processes of rural change,
driven by an emerging trend of large-scale land deals. This article
discusses potential future pathways by analyzing two contrasting visions
and realities of land use: the aim of the governmental elites to foster
surplus-producing rural areas for overall economic growth, employment
creation and ultimately poverty reduction, and the attempts of
smallholders to maintain and create livelihoods based on largely
self-sufficient rural systems. Based on the MuSIASEM approach, the rural
economy of Cambodia and different rural system types are analyzed by
looking at their metabolic pattern in terms of land use, human activity,
and produced and consumed flows. The analysis shows that the pathways
of self-sufficiency and surplus production are largely not compatible in
the long term. Cambodia's rural labor force is expected to increase
enormously over the next decades, while available land for the
smallholder sector has become scarce due to the granting of Economic
Land Concessions (ELC). Consequently, acceleration in rural–urban
migration may be expected, accompanied by a transition from
self-employed smallholders to employment-dependent laborers. If the ELC
system achieves to turn the reserved land into viable agribusinesses, it
might enable added value creation; however, it does not bring
substantial amounts of employment opportunities to rural areas. On the
contrary, ELC have high opportunity costs in terms of rural livelihoods
based on smallholder land uses and thus drive the marginalization of
Cambodian smallholders.
