218 Community Food Security
Changes in farming
In Prey Veng, Cambodia, people have grown enough rice to feed themselves
for as long as anyone can remember. Along with rice, they traditionally ate
wild greens, fish, eels, snakes and other animals from the rice paddy, as
well as fruits, nuts, and roots from the forest, and meat from animals they
hunt. This diet gave them good health all year round, except in times of war
or flooding.
More than 40 years ago, the government began to promote new farming
methods to increase production of a few main crops, like rice, for export. These
new methods were part of a worldwide change in agriculture, the deceptively
named Green Revolution. The Green Revolution encouraged the use of chemical
pesticides and fertilizers to produce more rice than traditional methods. It also
used large irrigation systems and machinery to plant and harvest.
When they started using these new farming methods, the people of
Prey Veng were able to produce large amounts of rice to sell. They used the
money to improve their houses, build roads, and buy personal goods like
clothes and radios. The villagers stopped using animal manure, stopped
rotating rice with dry season crops, and stopped using other traditional
farming methods as well.
The new methods worked very well for growing large areas of a single
crop, and increased the amount of rice they had. But over time, they
discovered that their land and the way they ate had changed. Herbicides
killed the wild greens the villagers had eaten before. Fish and other wild
foods grew scarce. Year by year they spent more money on chemicals and
had nothing but rice to eat. Before long, the soil in their fields no longer
supported healthy crops, and rice yields began to go down.
Coming together to discuss the growing hunger, the villagers recalled
the old ways of farming that used mixed crops, field rotations, and natural
fertilizers to grow crops all year round. They saw many advantages to the
traditional methods, and decided to change back. They also began trying
new methods like planting rice plants closer together and growing different
crops in the same field.
A Community Guide to Environmental Health 2012