Social Sercies and Assistances in Cambodia

Cambodia is one of the poor countries in the world. 80 per cent of population are farmers. They cultivate rice. Their rice cultivation is not modern yet, they still used the old style of farming, which depends completely on raining. If there is not enough rain fall, their rice would not grow to cause farmers face with food shortage. Every year, they face with drought and flood which caused their rice growing damaged. Actually, Cambodia has a state agricultural university to produce a lot of agricultural engineers who could help the farmers to improve their cultivation to make it more productive. However, those engineers do not use their knowledge and skills they learned for improving farming products because they are not encouraged by authorities to apply their understanding. On the other hand, they do not want to go back to help the farmers because their living wage is not enough for them to pay daily consumption. Another hand, the government does not have clear policy to encourage university students to apply what they have learned from the class. The ministry of agriculture is not working well to help farmers to produce high crops. Every one who live in Cambodia, they must see the minister of agriculture to work in most of his time in field. He does a lot of effort to help farmers to make good farm. Most of people seem not understand why this minister has always been in field but farmers face problem of rice growing every year. They asked whether the minister has real intention to help farmers or he has just played around the farmers? Or has good will for farmers but he has not knowledge about managing agriculture? Cambodia also has ministry of water resource to manage water to make farmers able to grow rice and other farming activities. However, this ministry does nothing besides inauguration new bridge and irrigation. Therefore, farmers are facing with food shortage every year. This burden is put on the social affairs shoulders. What social affairs does in order to address this heavy burden? Actually, social affairs has its own budget which is given by ministry of economic and finance every year. However, this budget is used once there is an order from high level people only. If there is no order from these high level of people, they would use this money only for offering people who are identified by chief villagers, they are poor. They called disaster program. Once every one hear the word disaster, it seems this money will go to people who are facing with house firing, house damaged by flood, old people live without relative care, and so on. Actually, this money is not used for that purpose, it is used for political gain which is used only two times per year. You could imagine how effective of using this money? How can this ministry could help poor or marginalized or vulnerable people? Tremendous of activities which requires social affairs to take responsible, is not fulfilled. While NGOs made a lot of efforts to fill gaps but this still not able to help the poor people. That's why there are a lot of irregular migration made to Vietnam, Thai, Malaysia, Taiwan, Hong Kong resulting sexual and labor exploitation happening on Cambodian people.