World Agriculture Watch

WAW and Cambodia’s Ministry of Agriculture draft smallholder rubber-farming programme

28/09/2018

The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) and the Ministry of Agriculture of Cambodia have teamed up to establish a project that will focus on lifting the living standards of smallholder rubber farmers in Cambodia, Myanmar and Thailand.

The two parties made public their plans at a project-outline meeting between Cambodian Agriculture Minister Veng Sakhon and Pierre-Marie Bosc, senior officer at FAO. 

Mr Bosc said FAO’s World Agriculture Watch initiative would collect data from each country, analyse it and compare data sets to assess the efficiency and productivity of the countries’ rubber sectors. The programme is being designed in cooperation with the French Agricultural Research Centre for International Development (CIRAD).

The WAW team found that farmers that harvest latex encounter problems in a number of areas, particularly in relation to pricing, climate change and yield stagnation. According to Minister Veng Sakhon, the Cambodian government fully supports the project and considers it to be aligned with its goal of boosting the rubber sector by increasing yields, reducing costs, enhancing product quality, ensuring the sector’s sustainability and boosting farmers’ incomes.

      

Cambodia hopes the WAW team will work with its agricultural experts to advance the rubber sector and make it more sustainable.

Pol Sopha, director-general of Cambodia’s General Directorate of Rubber, said his department and WAW had collaborated to draft a plan for the project. Mr Sopha noted that Cambodian farmers had recently been selling natural rubber for around KHR 4,100 per kilogram, or USD 1,000 per tonne, only marginally above their breakeven price of USD 900 per tonne. Cambodia has 160 000 hectares of land cultivated by smallholder rubber farmers and 70 percent of this land has already been harvested. Cambodia is able to produce 220 000 tonnes of natural rubber per year.