15 pages, A significant emphasis on scaling up food security efforts is needed to achieve Sustainable Development Goal 2 (Zero Hunger) by 2030. Scaling up sustainable intensification efforts for Cambodian smallholder farmers is key since they face greater exposure to the uncertainties of climate change, globalizing markets, and rural-to-urban migration. One way to increase the effectiveness of efforts and the scaling up of sustainable intensification technologies is through improving access to information about production and marketing technologies. This study aimed to identify sources of information about sustainable technologies available to smallholders and barriers that may be preventing adoption. Information was gathered from a household survey to document the sources of agricultural information for smallholders in Northwest Cambodia. This research suggests Cambodian smallholders are receiving agricultural extension services, however, the overall quality and effectiveness of these messages are unknown, since NGOs with competing foci are the primary provider of extension information. Smallholders face significant barriers that prevent the adoption of sustainable technologies and participation in markets, such as low price for goods, poor product quality, lack of time, and concerns for safety. Future endeavors to strengthen the price of goods and alleviate market-related challenges would likely result in increased smallholder income and food availability.
22 pages, Cambodia’s ruling party cracked down on the press, civil society, and opposition in the lead up to the 2018 national elections. Drawing on interviews with Cambodian journalists who lost their jobs, as well as long-standing research on rural struggles in Cambodia, we argue that the Cambodian state’s crackdown on media is part of an ongoing transformation of authoritarian populism that has reduced the space for rural collective action. The state’s repression and co-optation of media also signals a change in the ruling party’s brand of populist authoritarianism: from simultaneously courting and spreading fear amongst rural voters, to casting rural people aside. The media is a space of both emancipatory and authoritarian potential, and for the journalists who saw themselves as building the post-conflict democratic state, the crackdown signals the loss of a more emancipatory, democratic imaginary. This study contributes to analyses of authoritarianism as practice by drawing attention to the various scales and spaces in which it is produced, enacted, and imagined.
25 pages., via online journal, Rural internet use, although still limited, is growing, raising the question of how rural people are using social media politically. As a vehicle of communication that permits the rapid transmission of information, images and text across space and connections between dispersed networks of individuals, does technological advance in rural areas presage significant political transformations? This article investigates this question in the light of a poor result for the Cambodian People’s Party in the 2013 elections, and the subsequent banning of the main opposition party, before the 2018 elections. Expanding internet use in rural areas has linked relatively quiescent rural Cambodians for the first time to networks of information about militant urban movements of the poor. Rural Cambodians are responding to this opportunity through strategies of quiet encroachment in cyberspace. This has had real effects on the nature of the relationship between the dominant party and the rural population and suggests the declining utility of the election-winning strategy used by the party since 1993. However, the extent of this virtual information revolution is limited, since neither the urban nor rural poor are mapping out new online political strategies, agendas or identities that can push Cambodia’s sclerotic politics in new directions.
