Cambodia is situated in Southeast Asia, located on the Gulf of Thailand and bordering the countries of Thailand, Laos and Vietnam. Its population in 2007 is estimated to be 13.9 million. 85% live in rural areas and 60% are under the age of 25.

Human Development

After enduring thirty years of brutal warfare and the genocidal Khmer Rouge regime, Cambodia remains one of the poorest countries in the world. Of Cambodia's estimated 14 million people, 41.6% live on less than 50 US cents dollar a day. Another 30% of the population is only earning marginally more than that. While poverty has fallen from its extreme levels at the end of the war in 1993, the vast majority of the population still has no access to clean water, adequate shelter, sanitation facilities or electricity. Malnutrition is endemic and thousands of children die every year from easily preventable diseases. Infant, child, and maternal mortality rates are among the highest in Asia. The average life expectancy in Cambodia is 57.4 years, but can be much lower in poorer rural areas. Low spending on education perpetuates poverty, as children of poor families are forced to drop out of school – making it harder for them to access opportunities as adults. In 2005, only 58.9% of students reached grade 5 and 67.3% of those fifteen and older were illiterate. Although public education is supposed to be free, students are forced to pay unofficial school fees to supplement the meager $15-$30 salaries of public school teachers. Those who cannot afford these fees, such as the 10,000 to 20,000 children living on the streets of Phnom Penh, do not go to school.

Rising Inequality and Deepening Poverty

The gap between the rich and the poor and rural and urban areas is increasing rapidly. Macro-economic growth has been high, with an average annual growth rate of 8.2% over the decade from 1993 to 2004, but this growth has been highly concentrated in urban areas and narrowly based on the garment and construction sectors, so it has not translated significantly into poverty alleviation. A 2007 study by the Cambodian Development Research Institute (CDRI) has also found rising inequality in and between rural communities. While well located communities with fertile soils and access to irrigation are prospering, isolated communities without good roads, irrigation or access to markets are becoming poorer. Poverty and destitution is escalating particularly for those communities whose livelihoods have traditionally been reliant on natural resources, which have become increasingly concentrated in the hands of the rich and powerful. Deforestation in the form of illegal logging is having a devastating effect on both the environment and the livelihoods of hundreds of thousands of people who rely on non-timber forest products for their subsistence. A 2007 report by UK-based forest watchdog Global Witness claims that “a kleptocratic elite stripping Cambodia 's forests,” citing the last global forest cover survey by the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) which found that Cambodia had lost 29% of its primary tropical rainforest cover over the last five years.

The Rural Economy

Agriculture remains the backbone of the Cambodian economy - 71% of the labor force earns a living from agriculture and 60% of them are engaged in subsistence farming. Paddy rice cultivation accounts for 88% of the total area of agricultural production in Cambodia. While it is improving, Cambodia 's rice yields remain the lowest in the region at 2 tons per hectare on average. Cambodian farmers suffer from a lack of knowledge of modern farming techniques and market information; a lack of farming tools and quality seeds; very high costs of transportation and energy; and most critically a lack of irrigation. Only 7% of arable land in Cambodia benefits from irrigation, compared to 45% in neighboring Vietnam. A report by the Economic Institute of Cambodia found that 84% of farmers considered lack of irrigation their biggest constraint on production. Many said limited access to affordable credit was another significant obstacle.

Landlessness and Impoverishment

Efforts to reduce rural poverty have been frustrated by rising landlessness. For the rural poor, who make up 90% of those who survive on less than one US dollar a day in Cambodia, land is their single most important asset. Yet 46% of rural families are estimated to be landless or owners of less than half a hectare of land. Landlessness is rising at an alarming rate of 2 percent each year, which the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) states is the central cause of rural poverty. Landlessness is caused by a variety factors from demographic pressures and external shocks – most often health problems – which drive the poor into debt and eventual landlessness.

Land concentration – closely related to landlessness - is also a serious concern, with 70% of the land in Cambodia owned by the richest 20% of the population and 64% owned by the wealthiest 10%. This massive concentration of land in few hands has occurred rapidly since the privatization of land ownership in 1989, before which land was distributed relatively equitably. Much of the land owned by the rich is simply for speculative purposes and remains uncultivated, which inhibits agricultural growth and inflates prices. The same remains true of Economic Land Concessions, which are being granted to big investors under the flawed assumption that large-scale commercial plantations will generate higher returns than small-scale farming and create employment for local communities. In reality, of the 800,000 hectares that have been granted as concessions, UNDP found that only 72,000 are in production. In most cases, the investors simply cut down the forests and left the land idle or held onto the concessions, waiting for the land to increase in value. According to a 2007 report issued by the United Nations Special Representative for Human Rights in Cambodia, economic land concessions have led to increased landlessness and deprivation, displacement and environmental destruction. “Instead of promoting rural development and poverty reduction,” the report states, “economic land concessions have compromised the rights and livelihoods of rural community in Cambodia.”

For the poor who do own enough land to sustain themselves, there remains a persistent lack of tenure security. An estimated 80% of the population occupies land without any legal documentation proving ownership - a result of mismanaged land policy since the market reforms of the late 1980s and corruption and inefficiency in the current titling system, combined with a lack of public awareness about the Land Law. The absence of land tenure security is a significant impediment to agricultural growth and poverty reduction, and it also makes the vast majority of the population extremely vulnerable to rampant land-grabbing.

Women and Development

While extreme poverty is a serious problem across the Cambodian countryside, the situation is especially dire for women. Cambodian women face a daily struggle against poverty and deprivation. More than 65% of Cambodian women are farmers, and women head more than 25% of Cambodian households. Women household heads are more likely to work in agriculture than male household heads, and women are more likely to be landless or have significantly smaller plots of land. Only 9% of women in the workforce have more than a primary education, compared to 18% of men, and more than 70% are illiterate. The nutritional status of women and children in Cambodia – ranked as the worst in Southeast Asia – attests to the severity of the economic strain faced by rural women.

Urban Migration

When the rural poor are unable to generate enough income to support their lives, or they lose their land due to land-grabbing by the powerful or because of spiraling debt brought on through illness and the high cost of health care, they migrate to urban areas in search of jobs in the construction industry or garment factories. The $60-$70 monthly wages that garment and construction workers can earn working 60-hours weeks allow them to send $10-$15 home each month, but this is not enough to have a significant impact on poverty reduction in the provinces. Moreover, there are not enough jobs or affordable housing to keep up with the pace of urban migration. Urban migrants are often forced to earn their living from the informal economy - driving motorcycle taxis, scavenging on the garbage dumps for recyclables or selling their bodies in the thriving sex industry. They live in informal settlements, where living conditions are poor and residents are vulnerable to forced evictions and other human rights abuses by the authorities.

Sources: Cambodian Development Research Institute, Economic Institute of Cambodia, Oxfam UK, Phnom Penh Post, United Nations Development Program, United Nations Cambodia Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, World Bank.

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Cambodia's Millennium Development Goals

At the close of the 20th century, governments around the world agreed on a set of common goals for developing countries, known as the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). These goals pave the way forward to cut world poverty by half by 2015. With the accomplishment of these goals, billions more people can benefit from the global economy and tens of millions of lives can be saved.

The Millennium Development Goals are time-bound and targeted – they have a set beginning and end date, and they have set outcomes and achievements – in order to tackle extreme poverty in its many dimensions: income poverty, hunger, disease, inadequate shelter, and exclusion. At the same time the goals have been created to promote gender equality, education, and environmental sustainability. They are based on the rights of every person on the planet to health, education, shelter, and security as pledged in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the UN Millennium Declaration.

The Millennium Development Goals were created to apply to all developing countries, and consequently are broadly defined. In 2003 Cambodia localized the MDGs, and tailored them, through a process of national consensus, to meet the specific development needs of the Cambodian people. In this localization process, Cambodia added one more goal to the eight main MDGs that apply to each country. Recognizing that one major constraint to development is continued mine and unexploded ordinance (UXO) contamination, de-mining was added as the ninth major development goal.

Below is a general summary of Cambodia 's achievements and shortfalls in meeting each Cambodia Millennium Development Goals (CMDG) thus far:

Poverty has declined slightly at a rate of 1% per year over the last decade. While this trend is encouraging, a number of challenges will need to be addressed in the years to come if Cambodia is to reach its overarching goal of halving poverty by 2015.

The challenge will be to accelerate the decentralization process, reduce corruption, promote the development of agriculture and pro-poor rural infrastructure, provide effective social protection of marginalized and vulnerable groups and particularly security of land tenure for the poor. The escalation of landlessness needs to be reversed through meaningful land reform, including the granting of social land concessions, if Cambodia is to reach this goal.

Over 80% of children are now going to primary school, which means Cambodia is on track to achieve its goal for primary education. However, the enrollment ratio in secondary education is only 19% and only 749 of the 1621 communes have lower secondary schools.

The main challenges are to ensure equitable access to basic education, increase budgetary allocation so that schools can be upgraded and teacher salaries and training increased, subsidize transportation and scholarships to target students from poor families, and improve the quality of teaching.

Cambodia is recording improvements with respect to the gender gap in youth literacy rates, and female share of wage employment has increased, as has the proportion of seats for women parliamentarians. However, there is still a lot of work to be done. Women's overall literacy rate is only 61% while men's overall literacy rate is 82%. Only 1 girl out of 3 boys currently attends secondary school. Women also suffer from a very high 25% domestic violence rate.

The main challenges are to increase access of girls and women to higher education, increase the share of women in decision-making positions and enhance their capacity to find a job or start a business.

1 baby out of 10 dies before reaching their first birthday. Despite a growing economy and some improved development, under-five mortality has risen over the last 10 years. Health officials are now counting 124 deaths per 1,000 live births among Cambodian children under the age of five, as compared to 115 deaths ten years ago.

Cambodia is unlikely to meet Goal 4 unless decisive actions are taken to reduce the very high rate of malnutrition, increase the number of trained health personnel, improve sanitation and immunization coverage, access to health care and adequate funding to the health sector.

The proportion of births attended by skilled health personnel has remained very low throughout the last decade at around 32 percent. Use of modern contraceptives still remains a modest rate of approximately 20%. Progress on maternal mortality has been limited.

The main challenges are the lack of trained health personnel, the high cost of care, and the low education level among pregnant women. In order to meet goal 5, an effective response would need to improve access to health care and family planning services, increase the number of trained health personnel, provide information campaigns, better target and manage health expenditures.

HIV prevalence rate in the adult population fell from 3.3 percent to 2.6 percent between 1997 and 2002. Cambodia has realized impressive gains in condom use among direct sex workers from 16% to a little more than 91%, which puts Cambodia well on track to reach its CMDG target of 100 percent condom use. Despite tremendous efforts, Cambodia is still the worst affected country in the region, with an increase in the transmission between husband and wife and mother-to-child.

The main challenges to be overcome for meeting the HIV/AIDS targets are: changing popular perceptions and behavioral patterns, addressing gender discrimination and expanding support programs to people living with HIV/AIDS, increasing access to anti-retroviral treatment, improving coordination, and monitoring and evaluation of the socio-economic impact of the epidemic.

The malaria fatality rate has declined, but Cambodia remains among the 23 countries in the world with a high burden of TB.

Only 1/3 of the population in the countryside has access to safe drinking water.

The reduction of forest cover between 1985 and 2002 amounted almost 2 million hectares. At this rate, Cambodia will fall below its CMDG target of forest coverage representing 60% of Cambodia 's total area.

The main challenges to ensure environmental sustainability over the next decade are: ending corruption in natural resource management and combating the impunity of illegal loggers, empowering local communities to manage their natural resources, and increasing public and private investment in water and sanitation.

Landmines and other UXO have victimized more than 50,000 people so far and still endanger hundreds of lives each year. The government recognized mine action as one of the top priorities for the country's rehabilitation and development by developing a specific target to move towards zero impact from landmines and UXOs by 2012, giving Cambodia a unique ninth MDG.

Following almost three decades of conflict, Cambodia remains one of the worst landmine and UXO affected countries in the world with approximately 12 percent of Cambodian villages having to cope with high contamination by landmines and UXOs. Though great progress has been made in reducing civilian landmine related casualties, still hundreds of civilian casualties occur every year and many more carry the burden of past injuries.

Adapted from information on the United Nations Development Program Cambodia website.

Article of Interest:

"Cambodia and US" by David Pred

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