Conservation agriculture for climate-resilient rainfed uplands in the Western regions of Cambodia: challenges, opportunities, and lessons from a 10-Year R and D program

The political and territorial reintegration strategy that had been implemented in Cambodia to establish peace and order in the late 1990s caused the degraded evergreen forestlands to be allocated to the demobilized Khmer Rouge families in the western regions of the country. The increasing regional demand for cereals and tubers and the highland saturation in central rice areas have driven massive immigration of smallholder farmers. Almost half a million hectares of those forestlands were thus converted in less than 15 years for annual upland cash crops development. This dramatic expansion of agricultural area, without any plan for sustainability, has exerted tremendous pressures on the natural forest resources and on biodiversity. Its effects rapidly spread on the water and soil resources of Cambodia. With conventional practices and more frequent flooding and incidents of drought, smallholder farmers could hardly sustain their livelihoods, which are mainly based on annual upland farming. Farmers with investment capacity have shifted to planting tree crops and/or to animal production in order to cope with the hazardous phenomena. This case story presents the collaborative R&D program between farmers and researchers in Battambang and Kampong Cham provinces in Cambodia. The program aimed to restore soil fertility and build the resilience of smallholder farmers to the effects of climate change while improving crop productivity and profitability of the smallholder farmers. Using the Diagnosis, Design, Assessment, Training and Extension (DATE) methodology, the project implementers designed, tested, and evaluated crop production systems that are grounded on the principles of conservation agriculture (CA). DATE is a multi-scale, multi-stakeholder participatory approach. It integrates scientific and tacit knowledge, and is composed of four components: agrarian systems diagnosis, field experiment, on-farm assessment, and pre-extension. A number of CA-based cropping systems hav