Improving the marketing system for maize and soybeans in Cambodia

• Ministry of Commerce, Cambodia
• Cambodian Development Resource Institute, Cambodia

Agriculture in Cambodia has been dominated by rice, much of it grown by smallholder subsistence farmers. The Royal Government of Cambodia has set poverty reduction and improved rural development as top priorities. To achieve this, the Government has focused on the development of commercial, export-oriented agriculture. Diversification in cropping from rice is one component of this work. Among non-rice crops, maize and soybean are particularly important. These two crops have, after rubber, the highest export potential, but their largely informal and poorly developed marketing arrangements need to be improved. Thailand and Vietnam represent the main external markets, but constraints to market development include postharvest inefficiency, inadequate information flows, high transport costs and lack of external market linkages. For export potential to be realised these constraints must be overcome.
ACIAR has supported complementary research both to improve maize and soy production and help in crop diversification. Strengthening and developing marketing systems is needed to ensure the increased productivity delivers the benefits of exporting to nearby markets. This project mapped out the marketing system, including supply chains and the institutional environment, as a means of identifying areas for development and focus by key stakeholders.

This project aimed to bring about positive socio-economic change in the Cambodian soybean and maize marketing systems through the use of community-based decision-making, where the community of interest involved the various stakeholders of the marketing system (including farmers, collectors, traders and government officials).

The first task was to map the marketing system, and it began with the design of instruments for mapping. Once the system was mapped then data analysis could commence. Capacity-building took place through a 2-week course in Phnom Penh for Cambodian members of the research team together with researchers from two other related ACIAR projects in Cambodia.
Two workshops were presented: the first focused on maize, the second on soybean. After each workshop the research team examined the main issues that came out of workshop discussions, and conducted follow-up mapping research for each market. A Project Forum was held for stakeholders, where members of the research team listened and recorded the stories of the stakeholders (especially the grower participants) and incorporated them into an extension publication. These stakeholders thus became agents of change in what was the consolidation phase of the project.

The preliminary mapping of the Cambodian maize and soybean marketing systems led to a division of the country into two parts - eastern Cambodia and western Cambodia. This was because of significant differences in: (a) the type of crops grown (more soybeans in the east, more maize in the west); (b) the nature of the production-marketing systems (old established system in the east with less fertile land and a fragmented and antiquated marketing system while in the west the production-marketing system was relatively new and dynamic with highly fertile land centred around five large grain drying/storage operations); and (c) markets (eastern crops tended to move to Vietnam, while western crops tended to move to Thailand).
The work in eastern Cambodia involved taking both a micro approach (working from the perspective of a single soybean farmers' association) and a macro approach (working from the perspective of the marketing system as a whole). The micro approach led to the transformation of the Ta Ong Soybean Farmers Association from an organisation with no real function comprising 14 members to a successful micro-finance institution with 260 members that has to date made loans to over 1000 farmers.
The macro approach led to the development of a fully-fledged feasibility study for the development of an Agricultural Marketing Development Zone (AMDZ) in eastern Cambodia serviced by an Agricultural Marketing Development Centre (AMDC), an Agricultural Wholesale Market (AWM) and an inland port located on the Mekong River in Kampong Cham province. The feasibility analysis showed excellent potential for this development, which has received strong backing from the Royal Government of Cambodia and the Kampong Cham Chamber of Commerce.
In western Cambodia, the main conclusion to emerge from preliminary mapping and a stakeholder workshop was that the region suffered from poor communications between different levels of the supply chain. The research team explored various options for the development of an improved marketing communication system and proposed to local stakeholders the development of an Electronic Marketing Communication System (EMCS) based on the use of SMS technology and mobile phones. The team undertook a pilot project in which daily grain market information was collected by the Ministry of Commerce and entered onto a database that was accessible by mobile phone in Cambodia using SMS. The pilot project proved highly successful and it has stimulated work in a follow-up ACIAR project (ASEM/2006/130) to further develop the concept.
The main conclusion from this study was that Participatory Action Research (PAR) is a viable approach to research that can 'make a difference'. As such the main recommendation are that ACIAR consider ways in which to better integrate the PAR methods into its research programs that directly deal with farm groups (e.g. participatory rural appraisal) or village communities. However, the recommendations also highlighted the work's broader applicability (e.g. in improving agricultural marketing systems).