Rice crisis hits Cambodian kids

Global forces endanger breakfast program for poor children, despite a record local harvest
May 04, 2008

PRAY VIEV, Cambodia–The Sun Sun primary school – two low-slung ochre-yellow buildings and a wooden shack – is surrounded by rice paddies that recently yielded what farmers say is the best harvest in memory. But that has not shielded schoolchildren here from the effects of the global food crisis.
A countdown has begun among administrators here and at 1,343 other schools across Cambodia.
In less than a month, the schools' rice stocks will run out and a popular free breakfast program will be suspended indefinitely because of soaring food prices.
Short of cash, the World Food Program, the UN agency that feeds the world's poorest people, can no longer supply 450,000 Cambodian children with a daily breakfast of domestically grown rice supplemented by yellow split peas from the United States and tuna from Thailand.
In a country where a recurrent paucity of food has taught Cambodians to survive on a bare minimum of nutrition, children in this village are unlikely to starve. But some may miss out on an education.
"Most of the students come to school for the breakfast," said Taoch Champa, a 31-year-old teacher.
The suspension of the breakfast program illustrates one of the many ways the food crisis, in which the price of grain has soared in recent months, is hurting the world's poorest and most vulnerable people.
Only destitute schools were selected to take part in the program. Pray Viev is one of the poorest villages in Cambodia's most impoverished province, Kampong Speu.
When free breakfasts were introduced here eight years ago by the World Food Program, they were an instant hit.
"Students brought their brothers and sisters, 2, 3 and 4 years old," said Yim Soeurn, the principal at Sun Sun. "It was very hard to control."
Breakfast has been a magnet for students ever since, as well as the teachers' best friend.
Well-fed students are more attentive, tardiness is no longer a problem (breakfast is served at 6:30 a.m., before classes begin) and attendance by girls, who for years had been kept home by their parents, has increased sharply.
When the program was interrupted in January 2007 because of budget problems, attendance fell by 10 per cent, Yim said.
Menh Veasal, a 14-year-old at the top of his class, skipped school to collect frogs and crabs from a nearby river, his contribution to meals with his parents and seven siblings.
Sim Sreywat, 12, was ordered by her mother to trek to nearby mountains where she harvested tamarind buds and bamboo shoots.
The imminent depletion of rice supplies is particularly paradoxical for children who each day walk or ride their bicycles to school in a landscape of neatly delineated rice paddies.
Rice is plentiful in Cambodia, which has been a net exporter for the past decade. But the staple is becoming less and less affordable for the people who grow it.
A 2006 survey, well before the spike in food prices, found that 22 per cent of Cambodians in rural areas could not meet their own basic food needs.
The most productive agricultural land in Cambodia is near the borders with Thailand and Vietnam, and much of what is harvested there is exported at world-market prices.
But the soil in Kampong Speu province is sandy and parched, yielding less than 1 tonne per hectare, or 2.5 acres, half the national average.
Local farmers typically have plots that are too small to feed their families.
Worldwide, the World Food Program has begun an appeal for an additional $500 million to cover the increase in food prices.
In Cambodia, the price of rice is now above $700 a tonne, more than double the $295 per tonne the agency budgeted for this year.