Over the next five years in Cambodia, Feed the Future resources will directly help an estimated 138,000 vulnerable Cambodian women, children and family members—mostly smallholder farmers—escape hunger and poverty. More than 89,000 children will be reached with services to improve their nutrition and prevent stunting and child mortality. Significant numbers of additional rural populations will achieve improved income and nutritional status through strategic policy engagement, institutional investments as well as leverage of U.S. Global Climate Change Initiative and other resources.
To meet its objectives, Feed the Future Cambodia is making core investments in three key areas:
- Availability: enhancing agricultural productivity. Feed the Future Cambodia will upgrade or expand three major value chains: rice, fish and horticulture. Investments will support a sound agriculture input and production system, adoption of improved varieties and cultivation techniques, diversified rural production systems, and a strengthened agriculture policy environment.
- Access: improving rural incomes. Feed the Future Cambodia will support strengthened post-harvest systems, improved market access, expanded rural employment, and increased investment in marketing infrastructure.
- Utilization: improving nutritional knowledge and practice. Feed the Future Cambodia will support improved maternal‐child nutrition outcomes and infant and child feeding practices, improved household dietary quality and diversity, and improved access to nutrition-enhancing goods and services.
In addition to these three core areas, investments in improved natural resources management and resilience to climate change will contribute immediately and significantly to food security. Global Climate Change Initiative investments will be integrated with Feed the Future activities and focus on improving the ability to adapt to climate change through improved agricultural and fisheries management techniques; community-based natural resource management of forests, fisheries, water resources, and protected areas; and ecosystem services.
Further investments in improving the economic enabling environment will help build capacity for government and private-sector players in economic and natural resource governance skills at local and national levels.
Target Regions
Feed the Future will target the rural Tonle Sap region, focusing on the provinces of Battambang, Siem Reap, Kampong Thom and Pursat. This region has the highest poverty rate in the country, includes about a third of all food insecure households, and holds the highest concentration of child stunting and malnutrition. Agricultural production is concentrated in the region, which has relatively high soil fertility and whose inland fish catch constitutes 80 percent of Cambodia's fish harvested from rivers, lakes and ponds.
Highlights
Strengthen Agricultural Inputs, Production Systems, and Market Access. Agricultural production systems in Cambodia are characterized by a lack of modern on-farm technologies and high production costs. Critical inputs such as fertilizer and pesticides are unavailable or used incorrectly. Feed the Future investments will assist agribusinesses to provide more affordable, quality products and services, including those associated with seeds, fertilizers, pest management, and fisheries. Given the geographic dispersion and poor coordination among producers in Cambodia, linking producers together and to markets will be a priority. Feed the Future Cambodia will support activities that work at different links in the value chain to improve (increase and diversify) production and income and assist producer groups as well as enterprises involved in post-production and domestic trade activities.
Gender Integration. In contrast to much of the developing world, Cambodian women often control and manage household finances, though, on average, women are paid 30 percent less than men for the same work. Feed the Future Cambodia takes a multipronged approach to gender in all of its activities and includes programs that maximize women’s economic power, decision making, access to resources (e.g. credit, training), and opportunity to increase household income.
Improved Nutritional Status, Especially of Women and Children. To help reduce malnutrition, Feed the Future nutrition activities are targeting infant and young child feeding practices, micronutrient supplementation for women and children, food fortification, and point-of-use clean water treatment. In addition to building on existing health, water and sanitation, and nutrition programs, Feed the Future Cambodia will bring a food-based, agricultural, environmental, and private-sector approach to targeted nutrition messaging and education to change key dietary practices.
Diversify Rural Production Systems and Income Generation. Rural households engaged in agriculture demonstrate little diversification and are heavily dependent on rice production as a major source of income and food. On-farm income diversification will help reduce the risk to farmers of income shortfalls improving their resilience to changes in the price of rice and climate variations such as untimely rainfall. Diversification into higher-value products such as vegetables, fruits and aquaculture will also offer significant financial gains and increase demand for local on-farm jobs.
