As much as 15 percent of Cambodia’s rice crop is illegally exported to Thailand and Vietnam, an agriculture expert said Wednesday. Rampant cross-border smuggling means much-needed rice leaves the country without delivering the economic payback of a legitimate export.
Dealers buy rice directly from farmers and drive it into Thailand and Vietnam, before it has been recorded as part of Cambodia’s official harvest, said Tim Ekin, seed production adviser at the Australia-funded Agriculture Quality Improvement Project.
“Rice millers buy a percentage of the official rice harvest, but illegal traders take it straight from the farmers before it has been quantified,” Ekin said. “Thai rice dealers mix Cambodian rice with other varieties because it is cheaper, and Vietnam has a domestic rice deficiency because it exports too much,” he added.
At harvest time, he said, boats and trucks loaded with rice can be seen teeming across Cambodia’s borders. “I would estimate that between 5 percent and 15 percent of Cambodia’s rice crop leaves the country this way,” Ekin said.
“The practice is damaging, because it doesn’t put money in farmers’ pockets, or in government coffers,” he said. Instead, profits stay in the hands of the rice smugglers.
But Chan Tong Yves, secretary of state for the Ministry of Agriculture, sees the unrecorded exports as a natural element of cross-border trade.
“Farmers usually sell agricultural products to their neighbors. There is no problem,” he said Thursday. “The farmers produce these things for sale; if they did not sell [the rice], what would be the reason to produce it?”
Yields have dropped in recent years, failing to provide an adequate living for Cambodian rice farmers and leaving many people hungry. Drought and flooding dropped average yields to a low of 1.5 tons per hectare in 2002, compared with 1.9 tons in 2001 according to government estimates.
