The big business bogeyman shouldn’t obscure the reality of
Cambodia’s structural poverty.
Image Credit: Cambodia textiles factory via Shutterstock |
By Laurie Parsons
The Diplomat - December 23, 2013
During the last three years in particular, reports emerging
from Cambodia’s garment factories have cast the industry in a disturbing light.
The image of young women toiling for hours in dark, sweltering conditions for
companies apparently averse to the diversion of even the smallest slice of
their profits towards safety measures that could save the lives of their
employees is a powerful one, and has placed great pressure on the Cambodian
government to act in pursuit of an acceptable minimum wage.
What such reports invariably underplay, however, is the far
more intractable reality that starts just meters away, beyond the factory
walls. Impressive though the figures on the Cambodian garment industry are –
400, 000 garment workers from a total population of around 15,000,000 is an oft
quoted statistic – they tell only a fraction of the story of migration in
Cambodia. This “gentle land,” characterized as docile and unchanging by
visitors from ancient Chinese merchants to their 21st century descendants is
now, more than ever, churning with the movement of labor.
According to a forthcoming IDRC funded research project,
even those migrant enclaves, such as Teuk Thla in the West of Phnom Penh, built
in the shadow of a dozen or more garment factories, comprise only around two
thirds garment workers, with a litany of other occupations completing the
occupational profile. Elsewhere, amongst the half-built skyscrapers of the
construction boom, or the silage tanks that filter Phnom Penh’s award-winning
water supply, the numbers would be expected to be much higher. Almost none of
these workers enjoy the security, safety or level of pay received by those who
toil in the factories.
Their alternatives are rarely as salubrious, from the sun
baked, back breaking, toil of construction work, where cheap cement torments
the skin and scars the lungs, to a place amongst the army of garbage workers
who crisscross Phnom Penh’s streets at night. For these latter workers, the
daily tasks of collection, transportation and sorting are compounded by the
shame of a very public engagement with the city’s waste. As a garbage depot
owner himself admitted: “Of all the migrant jobs, this is by far the lowliest.
When people come to work here I warn them that they will heavily looked down
upon but that they must not let this stigma coerce them into anti-social acts
such as stealing or it will make things even worse for the others.”
For anyone working and living under such conditions to
proclaim themselves “lucky,” as the vast majority of migrant workers do, tends
to strike a dissonant note to Western ears, resolvable only as the indomitable
spirit of mankind, unbowed by circumstance. Such words, though, are not
expressions of soulful bravery, but statements of numerical fact. They are the
lucky ones, as for many times more Cambodians, who lack the connections or
money to move, modern sector migrant labor remains an inaccessible cornucopia,
far removed from their own, increasingly barren, fields.
Since the turn of the millennium, the Kingdom has suffered
at least five of its worst recorded nationwide droughts or floods, alternating
with cruel regularity and catastrophic disruption to livelihoods. With record
surpassing record in terms of economic damage and popular displacement,
evidence is mounting that these extreme events are rooted in the irreversible
process of climate change.
And yet, even in the throes of this environmental crisis,
poverty figures have plummeted during the past two decades. The government,
perhaps enchanted more by the myth of Ankorean fertility then the contemporary
reality thereof, attributes this to the rising price of rice during the period,
expediently setting aside the detail that many of the poorest Cambodians are in
fact net consumers of the staple. As a senior source at the Asian Development
Bank’s Cambodia mission attests, these forgotten poor have been left with only
one solution: “People end up to their eyeballs in debt, taking out more and
more loans to survive climate shocks… People are smoothing their consumption
with debt.”
Once the preserve only of individual moneylenders, the rise
of microcredit has seen the accessibility of debt skyrocket during the past two
decades, with recent research from Kandal province indicating that debt as a
percentage of annual income has now risen above sixty percent in some rural
areas. There and elsewhere, as rural roads have been expanded and improved,
brightly colored, air conditioned offices have sprouted alongside them,
offering easy money with minimal collateral. For those as yet insufficiently
tempted, young men in crisp white shirts ride their brand new company scooters
through the villages, collecting repayments and advertising loans. On any given
day, debt is rarely more than a whistle and a wave away.
Of course, those unable to survive on their rural incomes
without debt are inevitably unable to settle their loans by those same means.
Once repayments can no longer be made, the only remaining option is to send
whoever is able to the city, with or without guidance, with or without
knowledge of a job. If such last-ditch strategic migrations fail, as they
frequently do, the consequences for the household are ruinous. All Cambodian
villages have their stories of the families who staked and lost their last chip
on the city.
However, as long as Cambodians continue, in common with so
many of their counterparts elsewhere in the Global South, to be propelled by
the untrammelled effects of climate change towards the twin cogs of debt and
exploitative labor, they will have no choice but to take such gambles and, if
they succeed, gratefully accept whatever terms they are offered. “We are lucky”
they will continue to say and at home their elders will agree, albeit in
greater recognition of the Faustian flavor of the bargain. They will sigh, as
one such village headman did recently, that “if the factories close, this
village will die.”
Laurie Parsons is a doctoral candidate studying Cambodian
labor migration at King’s College London.
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