ABSTRACT
Cambodia has experienced significant political change over the past 50 years, changes that have dramatically impacted life in the countryside. While agrarian change is linked to forms of modernization and economic development, as found elsewhere in Asia (Rigg 2006), the Khmer Rouge regime (1975-1979) left a particularly challenging legacy. Beyond the psychological trauma of the genocide, all forms of private property were abolished with rural and urban populations alike being uprooted and forced to collectively cultivate rice. Collectivization continued, to a certain extent, through solidarity groups under the People’s Republic of Kampuchea (1979-1989) (Slocomb 2006) until 1989 when private property and land concessions were reintroduced (Chandler 2008). There has since been a scramble for land, often at the expense of smallholders, and Cambodia’s countryside is rapidly transforming, largely associated with the declining availability of land for smallholder farmers (Scheidel et al . 2014). This is problematic from a smallholder livelihood perspective since Cambodia, unlike many other Southeast Asian countries, continues (for the moment) to be an agrarian economy: 80 percent of its population lives in rural areas; 51 percent of the active labor force works in agriculture, forestry, hunting, and fishing (World Bank 2013).
