Community development activities aimed at improving living conditions among the poor neither reduce the number of rural families who lose their land nor help them acquire new land, researchers at a national conference warned Tuesday.
Researchers conducted extensive studies on links between development and landlessness and said the number of rural families without any access to land was still increasing, even though two-thirds of the development projects in surveyed areas received positive appraisal.
“It seems there is nowhere where development activities are having sufficient impact to prevent or reduce landlessness across the villages,” said researcher Vonn Vinary at the first national conference on development and landlessness.
The conference was organized by the ministries of Rural Development and Land Management and the international NGO Oxfam at the Institute of Technology of Cambodia.
Vonn Vinary said a survey conducted by the Oxfam Land Study Project of more than 45 development organizations in 145 villages in 15 provinces found more than 4,000 out of 30,000 families surveyed were without land. Overall, landlessness increased from 3 percent to 13 percent in the last 15 years, she said.
The survey also found that more than a half the landless families have never had land, and the remaining families lost their land because poverty forced them to sell it.
The survey also found that natural rural population growth is the largest single reason people remain landless.
Meanwhile illness was the major cause of losing land, she said.
All the families surveyed are beneficiaries of various community development activities, she said. She noted, however, that those activities fail to reach the poorest of the poor.
In the sample villages, 130 projects among nearly 1,000 development activities were low-interest loan projects, but 20 percent of these projects resulted in a loss of land, she said.
Only 26 attempts among the 1,000 projects were delivered exclusively to landless families, she added.
With such findings, she concluded only four projects directly prevented landlessness.
Sek Borac, an agronomist with the Cambodia Development Resource Institute, echoed concerns that the rapid growth of the rural population has caused a number of new landless families.
He projected this tendency would produce more landless generations and more people would end up selling their labor to other farmers, private industrial sectors or other countries, unless land is redistributed.
The two urged Cambodia to re-focus development activities to redistribute agricultural land to the rural poor.
Responding to their arguments, conference participants raised several questions about alleged land grabs by powerful officials and businessmen. They questioned the lack of a legal framework to ensure land ownership for vulnerable people and community development projects that would directly benefit the landless.
“I don’t understand why there are many landless people in this country. Cambodia has lots of land compared to its population,” said a provincial official who deals with rural development.
The three-day conference ends Thursday and is expected to shape new approaches to reduce landless families in the long run.
“Voices and concerns should be heard by concerned ministries….Land is a hope, a passport for the rural poor to improve their livelihoods,” said Ly Thuch, secretary of state at the Ministry of Rural Development.
