Abstract
Since the early 1990s, after decades of conflict, Cambodia has sought to maintain stability and reduce poverty. Or not? Reading Professor Kerbo’s book on poverty in Cambodia, one starts to think that the Cambodian elite presides over an economic system driven by cowboy capitalism in which poverty reduction is not even a remote priority. The country is stable and economic growth is robust, but Kerbo argues that Cambodia is experiencing ‘a kind of Khmer Rouge revisited, but with no irrational communist idealism: simple inhuman greed’ (p. 7).
Kerbo paints a bleak picture of Cambodia’s socio-economic progress of the last two decades. In fact, things seem to be getting worse for most poor people and in this respect the title of the book might as well have been the ‘exacerbation’ of Cambodian poverty. In 10 chapters, Kerbo provides a comprehensive overview of contemporary poverty dynamics in one of the most troubled countries in South-east Asia.
Chapters 1–3 introduce the topic, provide useful historical context and present worrying statistics. Approximately 40 per cent of the population survives on less than $1.25 a day and income and land inequality are rising.
Chapters 4 and 6 form the best part of the book. Kerbo guides the reader on a journey through the Cambodian countryside and urban areas. He introduces us to poor farmers who sell a part of their land if they need to pay hospital bills for their children, a school teacher in central Cambodia who explains the difficulty of life in the village, families living just outside of Phnom Penh who were forcefully evicted for the sake of big (often foreign) real estate projects such as hotels and condominiums and a number of brave non-governmental organization workers who are trying to improve livelihoods, education and health, but who are swimming against a massive tide. Kerbo interviewed more than 200 poor families all over Cambodia culminating in detailed in-depth insights into the nature of rural and urban hardship amidst a corrupt political environment fostering self-enrichment through suppression of critical voices, unsustainable foreign direct investment and land grabbing.
Chapters 5 and 7 provide a comparative perspective focusing on Thailand, Vietnam and Laos. Comparing Cambodia with Vietnam and Laos makes sense, but it is somewhat unfair to devote an entire chapter to Thailand; a country that is so far ahead of Cambodia and that was neither destroyed by direct colonial rule nor the Vietnam War (probably Thailand actually benefited from the Vietnam War due to huge financial and other support from the USA). It would have been more appropriate to pay more attention to Laos. Both Cambodia and Laos are small countries squeezed by Thailand and Vietnam, and the efforts to integrate them in the wider Greater Mekong Sub-region have so far been patchy at best. Kerbo interviewed low-land farmers in Laos, but did not focus on the many ethnic minorities living in the hills and mountains whose first language is not Lao. This part accounts for around 50 per cent of the total population. Although Kerbo mentions the socio-economic problems the country is facing, he has a relatively positive view on Lao’s development trajectory. Instead I would argue that Laos is in danger of following some of Cambodia’s experiences. Due to in-migration of poor people, the poverty rate in Vientiane Province has increased between 2002 and 2008 according to the latest UNDP data, and the political elite does not care much about displaced citizens who need to make way for hydropower projects, mining sites and large scale plantations. The comparison with fast-performing Vietnam suggests that Cambodia should study more the poverty reduction policies implemented by the Vietnamese government; obviously once there is a political willingness to do so. In the scope of just 25 years, education, health services, microfinance, electricity and roads in the country side have improved greatly. Villagers now enjoy more opportunities and rural–urban migrants have a reasonable chance to enter the lower middle class.
The next two chapters analyze two main reasons for the deplorable state of Cambodian socio-economic progress: Chapter 8 sheds light on rampant corruption permeating society and Chapter 9 discusses state incapacity. The absence of a functioning state bureaucracy is crucial as it is here that Cambodia diverges from other countries in the Greater Mekong Sub-region; even Laos to a considerable extent. Kerbo writes about how state capacity gradually deteriorated in recent centuries, about the French who brought in Vietnamese to manage Cambodian affairs, and of course, about the Khmer Rouge years in which so many intellectuals were murdered. As a result, young politicians and civil servants are not embedded in a work ethos emphasizing service delivery to citizens, but see many colleagues appropriating as many public assets as possible. This is worrying given the prospect that Cambodia will receive around $1 billion annually in oil revenues from 2011 onwards. Kerbo describes this as the coming ‘great oil rip-off’ (p. 164). What share of oil revenues will eventually go to the poor, one wonders?
Chapter 10 concludes this book by summing up the main problems and root causes: continuation of forceful slum evictions, land grabbing, a missing civil society, corruption and state incapacity. China and South Korea are investing actively in Cambodia; ASEAN has a policy of non-interference and the USA and the EU have no geopolitical interest in the country, so we cannot expect much from the international community. Perhaps the only thing we can do is wait for bottom–up resistance which occasionally occurs in Burma and indeed is so dramatically unfolding in the Middle East.
Overall, this book is an important contribution to the scrutiny of development in South-east Asia and convincingly argues that we should pay much more attention to the complex relationships between economic growth, state incapacity, poverty reduction and socioeconomic inequality in Cambodia, Laos, Timor Leste, Burma and the Philippines.