Agriculture in Cambodia
land area for crop
Agriculture accounts for 22 percent of Cambodia’s GDP, and employs about 3 million people.
Agricultural history
Rice production, a vital economic indicator in Cambodia's agrarian society, frequently fell far short of targets, causing severe food shortages in 1979, 1981, 1984, and 1987.
The plan's 1987 target for the total area to be devoted to rice cultivation was 1.77 million hectares, but the actual area under cultivation in 1987 amounted to only 1.15 million hectares. After 1979 and through the late 1980s, the agricultural sector performed poorly. Adverse weather conditions, insufficient numbers of farm implements and of draft animals, inexperienced and incompetent personnel, security problems, and government collectivization policies all contributed to low productivity.
Collectivization and solidarity groups
Collectivization of the agricultural sector under the Heng Samrin regime included the formation of solidarity groups. As small aggregates of people living in the same locality, known to one another, and able to a certain extent to profit collectively from their work, they were an improvement over the dehumanized, forced-labor camps and communal life of the Pol Pot era. The organization of individuals and families into solidarity groups also made sense in the environment of resource-poor, post-war Cambodia. People working together in this way were able to offset somewhat the shortages of manpower, draft animals, and farm implements.
In 1986, more than 97 percent of the rural population belonged to the country's more than 100,000 solidarity groups.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Agriculture in Cambodia” is land area for crop. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Agriculture, Cambodia and land, not as a finished interpretation.
Why this record matters
The phrase “land area for crop” supplies a clear boundary for inquiry. It also exposes the unanswered questions: who defined that boundary, when it became stable and which sources sit outside it.
The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jan 3, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q4694022. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1979, 1981, 1984 and 1987.
Overview language is designed for orientation and should not be treated as a substitute for the evidence cited beneath it. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
How to read it
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This entry incorporates text from “Agriculture in Cambodia” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.