After Water Recedes, a Prey Veng Village Copes With Flood’s Aftermath
baborng village, Peamro District, Prey Veng – For the villagers of Baborng, whose income comes mostly from rice and fish they sell in nearby towns, the 30-km stretch of road running to Prey Veng town is a lifeline.
The road runs along a narrow causeway that cuts through rice paddies and, for the last few kilometers, serves as a dike, curving around the edge of a large dam. Locals say the road was once lined with trees, but during the Khmer Rouge regime in the late 1970s, they were cut down.
Each year since then, when wet season rain raises the level of the dam, the causeway gets a little narrower. In 1996, when the area was hit by hard flooding, the dam broke through part of the causeway.
In a few places the road was washed away, but it was patched up, and traffic resumed; children cycled to school in nearby villages, off-season farm workers rode to town to raise extra money as day-laborers or motodops and oxcarts took harvests to market.
Then, during the last rainy season, the dam burst its banks again, drowning the whole area in water as deep as 10 meters in some places. It was the worst flooding anyone in Baborng can remember. An iron bridge halfway along the route was swept away, and the rest of the road was submerged. Villagers traveled in fishing boats over what had once been their wet-season rice crops.
Now most of the floodwater has receded—and with it, most of the road.
Where the causeway still stands, it’s now only wide enough to admit pedestrians and cycles. Elsewhere it’s been washed away, making muddy gullies in the road, 7 meters deep and, in some places, 20 meters long.
Local entrepreneurs have built a trail over the ruined road. They’ve carved a narrow dirt bike track that runs up and down the sides of ravines. They’ve slung bridges of rope and bamboo slats where there used to be metal and concrete ones.
For 1,000 riel per moto or 100 riel for a bike or pedestrian, travelers can make their way along the slow, perilous route to Baborng. Children offer to help push-start stalled motos up the steepest stretches for 100 riel. Other children and a few adults wait where they know the traffic will be slowest to beg travelers for money, food or empty bottles.
When outsiders come to Baborng, the occasion is unusual enough to attract a crowd. Farmers have planted a late crop of wet season rice, but most of the paddies are still under too much water to plant, and the villagers have time on their hands.
Of the 520 families in Baborng, 175 don’t have enough to eat, village chief Ros Chroeng said recently. Some families have managed to get by borrowing rice and money from their relatives. Others have borrowed from richer farmers, but most people have lost two crops to the floods already and are in danger of losing a third. The village lost much of its livestock—47 cows died of starvation when grazing land went under water. If they lose another harvest, poorer families won’t be able to afford to borrow at interest rates that are commonly as high as 100 percent over a three-month period.
Fish are more plentiful and easier to find now the waters are down, but with transport costs high, it’s harder to get the catch to market. And the most meager work—hiring out as a temporary laborer on other people’s land for a few thousand riel a day—has dried up, Ros Chroeng said. Even comparatively rich families now don’t have the cash to pay for outside help.
Many people went to Prey Veng or Phnom Penh to look for work. Most of them couldn’t find jobs, and now they’re back, their transport paid for with the last of their families’ savings, Ros Chroeng said.
What seed they had left, the villagers planted. But a lot of the nutrients in the soil have been washed away, and few can afford to buy fertilizer, farmers said. The seed donation they got from provincial authorities was poor quality, and only half of it sprouted. People had to wait until the water receded before they planted, and the wet-season rice went into the ground several weeks late. Now farmers fear there won’t be enough rainfall to irrigate the crop. Buying new water pumps is out of the question, and the fuel to run existing pumps is too expensive. The crop, still weeks from being harvested, is likely to be a bad one.
But at least disease hasn’t been a problem. Ros Chroeng’s two-room wooden house is lined with posters from NGOs cautioning against unsafe drinking water and unsafe sex. The villagers are used to floods, he said. They know water-borne disease is a danger, and they know what precautions to take.
World Food Program Deputy Country Director Praveen Agrawal agreed. Disease hasn’t been the problem some observers first feared, and he credits Cambodian farming families with having plenty of common sense when it comes to coping with floods, which strike every year.
What’s different about last year’s floods is their severity, Agrawal said. It’s normal for farmers to face a lean period of six to eight weeks at the end of the wet season when they can’t produce food. It’s “what we call the ‘hunger gap,’” Agrawal said.
“Normally [the farmers] would have borrowed. They would have paid it back in paddy—at an exorbitant rate, but they can still do it.”
But beyond a couple of months, most people can no longer afford to borrow. This year the hunger gap may stretch to six months. Farmers may be forced to sell off their capital—livestock, land and farming equipment— to raise money for food and more seed. Once they do that, their chances of ever recovering are slim.
If the hunger gap “lasts for six months, it destroys their whole means of existence,” Agrawal said
Now the floodwaters have receded around the country, donors have switched from offering emergency help—food and money—to financing long-term rehabilitation projects, said Paul Ka-ming Au, director of the UN Food and Agriculture Organization’s Scale program, which works on flood relief. Instead of giving people rice, donors are giving seed to plant new crops.
But the emergency handouts that were distributed late last year haven’t been enough to keep people from getting hungry while they wait for the next harvest to come.
“You get a 20 kg bag of rice, 10,000 riel, a krama, whatever,” Au said. “[But] you’ve already eaten that by now, and you’re not going to get anything for another three months.”
All over Cambodia, people are still short of food. The World Food Program, which recently completed a survey to find out how extensive the food shortage is, hasn’t yet released its findings, Agrawal said, and its full extent won’t be known until the end of the first dry-season harvest in March.
From his observation working in the field in Kandal province, Au puts it this way: “Instead of a farmer eating four plates of rice each day, he’s down to eating just one.”
And as the next planting season approaches, farmers need plenty of food. “They’re supposed to be plowing and planting now, and that’s very energetic work,” Au said.
In November, provincial authorities distributed 50 kg of seed to each family in Baborng village. Elsewhere in the country, people complained the distribution of flood aid wasn’t fair. They said some families were overlooked in favor of relatives, friends or political supporters of local officials.
But in Baborng, villagers say everyone got a fair share. When it was discovered that some families inadvertently had been overlooked in the handout, Ros Chroeng went door-to-door and made each family give back a little seed to make up the difference.
The distribution was fair, but it wasn’t enough.
Sar Roeurng, 42, hasn’t got any land. When his parents died seven years ago, he ran into financial problems and had to sell the family property in Prey Veng. He moved with his wife and six children to Baborng where he has a sister. The village chief allowed him to build a house on the outskirts of the village by the side of the road, but if the road is widened he’ll have to move.
He supports his family working on other people’s land, helping out with planting and building dikes and ponds. Usually he makes 2,000 to 3,000 riel a day—enough to get by with help from his two grown-up children.
But since the flooding, no one in the village has offered him work, he said. What money he had is gone—the price of rice, which has to be shipped in from outside, has risen from 1,000 riel to 1,500 riel a kilogram. Sar Roeurng has been out of a job for several weeks, and his adult children are no longer able to give much help to their parents and younger siblings.
When Sar Roeurng got his share of the rice seed donation, he traded it to a farmer for edible rice. The 20 kg sack lasted the family about 10 days. His son managed to get some work in the village and gave the family some more rice, but that’s running out quickly, and Sar Roeurng isn’t sure what to do next.
In the past he could go to Prey Veng to look for work as a day-laborer, but with the road ruined and the cost of transport up, there’s no longer any money in it.
“I have to live day by day, finding work where I can in other people’s fields,” he said. “I don’t know what to do in the future.”
If this rice crop succeeds, and farmers produce a surplus they can sell, they will run into another problem. With the road impassable for oxcarts or trucks, they won’t be able to get their crops to market. It’s a problem Cambodians are starting to face all over the country, said Kate Angus, acting deputy country director of the NGO Care. It’s likely to further stall people’s attempts to recover from last year’s disaster.
Chan Van, 31, has been running a grocery stall in front of her house for the last two years. Normally she makes about 3,000 riel a day—a welcome boost to her farming family’s income, she said.
She used to make a trip to the market town of Nak Loeang every morning and buy about 30,000 riel worth of fresh vegetables and other goods and resell them at her stall.
But since the flooding, the cost of traveling to Nak Loeang has risen from 2,000 riel to 5,000, and the journey—she travels by boat and three-wheel taxi so she can carry goods—is much slower. She makes the trip every other day at most.
Giggling with embarrassment, Chan Van swats away a swarm of fruit flies that are gathering on the vegetables she offers for sale. Most of her goods sell for 100 riel apiece. The most expensive item is Tiger Balm for 1,000 riel. But for weeks, she hasn’t made more than a few sales a day, and the food she buys rots in the sun while she waits for customers. She’s losing money, and if things don’t change, she’ll have to give up the business.
As she talks, a child tugs at his mother, asking for 100 riel to buy a snack. The mother refuses. Chan Van eyes them ruefully.
“No one has any money,” she said. “No money. No money.”
