With help from Oxfam, farmers replant after three months of heavy rain flooded crops.
February 3rd, 2012 | by Chris Hufstader
Pram Kimsot says it is easy to see which of the 200 families in his village are suffering the worst following flooding in the late summer and fall of 2011: “There’s no rice straw piled up in front of our houses,” he says. “It shows you didn’t have a good harvest, and this year it is one of the worst harvests we’ve ever had.”
Pram’s village is called Osala, and it is right on the edge of the Stoeung Sen river in Cambodia’s Kampong Thom province, one of the most severely affected in three months of flooding last year. All in all, 17 of Cambodia’s 24 provinces were hit by flooding, and the government estimates it drowned about 15 percent of national rice production for the year. In Kampong Thom, about half the land used for growing rice was inundated, destroying 35 percent of the crop in that province, and affecting 54,000 people.
Few of the straw piles in Osala are more than about four feet high. Many of the homes have no straw piles at all. So what can farmers do to recover?
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