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My buddy Al just gave me the tip and I have confirmed it…

To the delight of librarically-challenged and/or lazy researchers everywhere, Australian National University’s Press has made some of their titles available online for free download. Additionally, some ANU PhD dissertations are now available online. In my groping, I found little on Cambodia or agriculture, but there are plenty of titles focusing on elsewhere in the Asia-Pacific region. Well worth some browsing.

I sure hope that more institutions follow suit.

Across the street from the Moil Village Restaurant, outside of Phnom Penh on the road to Cheung Ek. 

I am not a cellular or a molecular biologist. I appreciate the research (what’s not to love about feedback loops, emergent properties and complex systems?), but I just do not enjoy the process. Nothing personal– I am just not a lab guy. But I am a biologist. As such, I was pretty excited when the gang over at Make blog tuned me in to clips of Harvard University Biovision’s award winning “Inner Life of the Cell” animation. I had seen an earlier example of their work– wonderful imagery of cellular processes, set to music, prompting my wife and I to dust off our molecular biology skills (frankly, her’s needed little dusting), and shout out the names of the structures and processes depicted in the piece. This time their animation has documentary-style narration, which is a nice touch. Elsewhere on the page, there are clips of other processes, lab procedures, as well as commentary on the project itself. Lots of fun things to watch for the biologically inclined, especially if you have bandwidth. I could not find their licensing policies on the website. But I hope that I will be able to put some of this to use next time I have to teach undergrads basic cell biology.

In many ways, water can be seen as a crystallization point for the study of the social-ecological systems in Cambodia. Much of the country is dominated by the Tonle Sap and its surrounding floodplains– one of the most productive freshwater fisheries in the world, some of the most fertile agricultural land in the country and an unique ecological system which humans have been involved with for more than a millennium.

Water access remains a problem in much of the country, at least during certain times of year. As a result, Cambodia’s successive political structures have often left their marks on the landscape in the form of irrigation schemes, with varying degrees thoughtfulness, maintenance and functionality.

In a similar fashion, successive generations of scientists have attempted to analyze the relationships between people and water management. Since the French colonial period, archaeologists have devoted a great deal of time to trying to understand the sophisticated water storage and irrigation systems of the Angkor Complex. One such example, included in the full text of Etienne Aymonier’s 3 volume, “Le Cambodge,” is available page-by-page at the National Library of France (just search by author to find it, though I found the system is a little wonky; but, maybe that’s because my French is a little wonky). Such efforts continue with the work of The Greater Angkor Project, and others. Elsewhere in the country, the Lower Mekong Archeology Project (LOMAP) and others have sought to understand how the earliest complex polities in Southeast Asia arose. Pre-dating Angkor by hundreds of years, they may have arisen at the edges of the lower Mekong floodplain in southern Cambodia, and been connected by a sophisticated canal system. In a different vein, recent studies by the MRC/WUP-FIN project have focused on ecology, hydrological function and modeling of the Tonle Sap. Even my own work focuses on incremental landscape transformation by farmers, often for water management and rice production– micro-scale, multi-functional, flexible and dependent upon a sophisticated knowledge of their local environment.

And that is just a haphazard smattering of some of the work which has been done or is on-going. There are many more projects than I have mentioned or link to here. I lack the requisite number of fingers and toes to keep track of all of the individual researchers, consultants and international development projects involved in various aspects of water management and access. Though as an aside, I should credit LOMAP and WUP-FIN for been particularly conscientious about making their literature available on the web– and their sites would be a good start if you want to dig further into the scientific literature in the archaeological and ecological spheres, respectively.

Recently, the Documentation Center of Cambodia has published an article by Jeffrey Himel in their periodical, “Searching for the Truth,” which has made a welcome contribution to the understanding of the centrally-planned irrigation systems of the Khmer Rouge. I hope that he expands his analysis further, as many questions remain. According to the director of DC-Cam, Mr. Himel is the only researcher to have deeply explored KR irrigation using the primary materials held at DC-Cam (a resource I too plan to plumb). He remains a graduate student at Cornell, but has been on the Cambodian hydrology scene for a while, owning Aruna Technology, a remote sensing/GIS consulting firm in Phnom Penh.

Since this latest issue has yet to appear on the DC-Cam website, the blog Deathpower in Cambodia, has been thoughtful enough to re-print the article in full for those who do not have access to hard copies of DC-Cam’s periodicals. I will definitely be stopping by their office to pick up a copy. I hope it has pictures– KR irrigation followed a UTM grid lines, and should have a pretty characteristic look from aerial photography or satellite imagery.

I have heard that his presentations are very interesting, no doubt in part for their striking imagery. I dug around a little bit, and was able to find an abstract of a presentation he gave at the International Water History Association conference back in 2001…

21. Jeffrey Himel, USA,Cambodia (202)

Back to the Future – The Past and Present of Agricultural Water Control in Cambodia

The control of water has always been of critical importance to the Khmer civilization. It has been argued that the development of sophisticated irrigation systems led to the rise of the Angkor Empire that dominated much of mainland Southeast Asia from the 10^th to the 14^th Centuries. The massive development of irrigation systems by the Khmer Rouge regime during 1975-1979 seems to have had its basis in recapturing this ancient glory. But was this the case? There is growing evidence and opinion that the large tanks built by the Angkorian Kings and extensive network of manmade channels were not primarily made for irrigation.

If the “hydraulic city” so beloved of the French scholars did not provide irrigation water for triple cropping of rice, then how did the empire grow to such prominence and afford such a plethora of public works? Most have argued that the natural hydraulic regime allowed additional crops of floating and flood recession rice that provided a surplus to support the Kings, their cults, their temples and their armies. Yet these same cropping systems have existed throughout Khmer history and still persist today while Cambodia remains barely self-sufficient in rice production.

This paper offers an alternative theory. Aerial photography from the 1950’s shows how large areas above the lowlands had been carefully contoured for soil and water management for other crops. In addition, the large number of ponds suggest that the ancient Khmer were frequent bathers and had good sources of water supply throughout the year – this would have had a huge effect on the economy through improved health of people and their livestock. These lessons from the ancient Khmer could be usefully applied to the modern development of the country as it emerges from decades of conflict.

Check out his analysis at Deathpower. Clearly interesting material. I will be watching for more in the future…

Thanks to Phil at Phnomenon for his tip about the Geo Mashup Plugin, I have finally started georeferencing my posts. I will try and stay up on new ones, and will be progressively adding spatial information to the older posts. As I do this, I will be tagging them as part of the category, “Map.” So, if you select that out of the category cloud, you should be able to see all of the posts for which I have added spatial information.

So, to see a map of Cambodia with a little pin marking the spot where a picture was taken or observation made, just click on the “Where am I?” link at the upper right of the page. The maps use Google’s satellite data– so zoom right in and have a look (note: some posts are in tight clusters, so coarse spatial resolution conceals just how many points there might be!). The finest resolution is okay for many rural areas, though they provide some very-fine grained resolution for areas around Angkor Wat and Phnom Penh, which is pretty cool.

I am still tweaking some of the display settings, so please forgive the legibility problems you will inevitably encounter if you click on the pins to see the link to the related post. Hopefully they will be ironed out soon.

Yesterday, I took a little ride up the main road to Siem Reap to see what I could see. We have had a couple of major rainstorms, which should have started to soften the soil enough for farmers to start plowing the fields which they will be planting to rain-fed rice. About 17km or so north of town, there is a large lake which spans both sides of the road. There is not a lot right around the lake, along the road there is a little place to buy snacks and lounge in a hammock lakeside.

However, I was interested in the farm across the road from the snack dealers.

They have a diverse little homegarden set up: coconuts, toddy palms, bananas, bamboo, cassava, and a bunch of other trees which I did not recognize. However, they also had a small irrigated plot of mung beans which you can see over on the far right of the image (it is tough to see, but look for the tree branches used for trellises).

Also grazing freely in this area along the lakeshore, near the farm, was a small herd of cows. I do not know who the owners were. I often see cows wandering freely, though herds grazing far from home will be tended by young boys. In this case, I think that they might have benefited from allocating someone to watch the cows. Clearly the forage around the lake is not in very good condition. However, mung beans are rich in nitrogen and likey pretty tasty (with forages, there is an inverse relationship between carbon and nitrogen content, which is mirrored in palatability– woody stuff does not taste as good, and has less protein). The cows are onto this.

There is a light fence protecting the bean plot, though I think that it was just constructed of bamboo and debris, and am certain that it was not particularly robust.

Breach it and they will come…

From another angle, you can see the end result. I did not stick around to see if the others joined their fellows in the bean plot. Note also the irrigation pump.

The farmers were no where to be seen. But I feel for them. Having hurled both stones and curses at cows and lazy herdboys in my maize/pigeon pea intercropping demonstration plots back in Tanzania, I can sympathize (believe me, more civil attempts at negotiation were totally ineffective). I am a strong advocate of live fencing, nice, dense thorny stuff. I have seen people use Pandanus to that effect here, but I do not yet know how well it would do when the floods are up. However, I think that there is a common farmstead rattan which would work on flooding areas. Though I have seen that managed more as clumps or thick hedgerows. I expect that I will have a better grip on the fencing situation, once I am out talking to farmers more often.

Fences and hedgerows are not just for keeping things in or out. They are pretty important ecologically too, potentially representing a substantial fraction of a landscape’s agrodiversity and contributing significantly to landscape heterogeneity. They are places to grow or manage useful plants (be they for medicines, food, fodder, mulch, firewood and more). Moreover, they can be crucial habitat for anything from beneficial predatory insects (as in, the kind that eats agricultural pests) to birds, herps and more.

Mind you, these are just my musings on fencing. I am not here to tell anyone what to do. My goal is a better understanding of what they are doing, how it is changing and why.

So while I have been poking around Kampong Thom, it looks like that first crop of Peace Corps volunteers went and got themselves sworn in. I guess that my invitation got lost in the mail. I just happen to hear about it through a friend. I had thought that something might be up, since the tv news reported that Peace Corps Director Ron Tschetter had meetings with both the King and the Prime Minister.

According to the U.S. embassy’s website…

In a recent ceremony attended by more than 300 Cambodian host family members, Cambodian government officials, and U.S. Embassy representatives, Peace Corps Director Ron Tschetter swore in Cambodia’s first ever group of Peace Corps Volunteers. The 29 newly minted Volunteers arrived in Cambodia on February 2, 2007 to undergo an intensive training program in the Khmer language, cross-cultural awareness, and technical skills related to their community development responsibilities…

…Immediately after the swearing-in ceremony, the Volunteers began to fan out across Cambodia to the provinces of Kampong Cham, Prey Veng, Svay Rieng, Takeo, Kampot, Battambang and Siem Reap.

I was wondering if any would turn up in Kampong Thom. Not this go-round. And, weren’t there 30 when they got here?

When Mamamandevu and I were sworn-in in Tanzania, I was one of the lucky ones was selected to address the crowd. Public speaking is traumatic enough. However much to my dismay, I was the third to speak, following two others whose 3 months of intensive Kiswahili language training had served them much better than it had served me. The day before the event, I had asked one of our instructors for help me with my few, well chosen words. She, trusting my abilties more than I did, pushed me into the the deep end with sophisticated gramatical structures and a lot of college-level vocabulary words. It was hard even for me to follow, let alone my audience. To top it all off, one of a crew of particularly jaded and cynical currently-serving volunteers broke the silence of the attentive crowd by laughing at me just as I began my speech (thanks for the derailment, Kate!). It was pretty awful.

Later, my wife and I became good friends with those very same jaded and cynical volunteers, clustered in the back of the crowd and hailing from some pretty remote villages. We wound up as neighbors, within a few hours bike ride of each other, and working together pretty closely.

As for the crew here, none of the four PCVs keeping blogs about their stay have mentioned anything about swearing in and moving out to their new spots. Though there are a couple of excited anecdotes about their first visits to their future new homes, the “site visit” which comes near the end of training. I figure that by now, they ought to be about all moved-in and are busy working on getting settled-in and deconfused.

For more official coverage, a couple of other pictures and excerpts from the speeches at the event, check out the official Peace Corps press release.

Since I was not at the ceremony, I pulled the image above from the embassy’s website.

So, I finally got out of Phnom Penh and up to Kampong Thom, the capital of the province of the same name. I am eyeballing villages west of town out on the floodplain as sites for the research project. So, I spent a few days poking around on the motorbike, rolling through villages and nearly getting lost out on the floodplain itself.

Those palms pictured above are sugar or toddy palms (ដើមត្នោត, Borassus flabellifer L.)– sources of sap which is cooked down into sugar or consumed fresh or fermented. And their fruits are tasty too. Notice how some of the crowns around not all round and fluffy? The leaves are also collected and used for construction materials and fuel.

It was a lot of fun riding, out on really sand roads amongst the deepwater rice fields. The going was a little tricky sometimes.

There were a variety of other habitats, in addition to the deepwater rice fields themselves — shrubs, tall grass, short grass and seasonal ponds. Many areas had been burnt, like the dried-up seasonal pond above, in preparation for planting. I did not get close enough to the Tonle Sap to run into any forest, as I only got about 8km from the nearest village before I decided that I ought to turn back since I was not exactly sure where the road was heading. Plus, I had an afternoon appointment. And, most importantly, it was lunchtime.

Many areas showed evidence of more advanced soil preparations, including plowing. Pictured here, field boundaries are marked in advance of other operations. Out here, fields are very large so generally farmers depend upon large, rented tractors to get their land ready in time. We have already had a little rain, so the soil is starting to soften up. This marks the begining of the soil preparation phase of deepwater rice production.  Planting usually starts after the Khmer New Year in mid-April.

The floodplain is also very important for livestock. There were a number of herds of cattle and water buffalo, varying in size from a handful of animals to one hundred or more.  I really saw only a couple of people out there the whole time– just the herd boys out with the livestock.  I am looking forward to getting out there again soon, and actually talking to some farmers about what they are up to.