Cambodia’s Capital Bustling as Hunger Lurks Not Far Away

Soung’s house stands in a small patch of green sugar palms and banana trees, surrounded by the cracked dry earth of Takeo province.

She rolled a reed mat across the bamboo floor of the sleeping room the other day and invited her visitors to sit. This traditional Cambodian hospitality was all she had to offer.

In a corner lay a half-empty bag of rice, her last. It was late September, the monsoon planting season, but there had been no rain for weeks, and only a shower then. Her husband, a rice farmer, was up on the road, trying to sell a few vegetables he had raised outside the thatched stilt house. Their three daughters were with him, and their boy sat beside Soung on the floor.

“I worry about the children,” she said slowly. “We have only rice porridge. No meat.”

Then, embarrassed but unable to maintain the dignity with which Cambodian farm families bear the drought and other hardships, she wiped a tear from her eye.

Contrast in Phnom Penh

Nearly 70 miles to the north, in Phnom Penh, the Cambodian capital, O Resey, the big free market, was stacked with bags of rice and other grains. For a price, the throng of shoppers could also buy Laotian coffee, Vietnamese sandals, smuggled blue jeans with Lee labels, Sony stereos and Johnnie Walker Scotch.

Newsboys hustled through the stalls selling the popular newspaper Kampuchea--the official name of the country still known to the West as Cambodia. Young girls browsed at a display of fuzzy Alpine-style hats, which were introduced by Cambodians returning from East Europe and have become popular. Old men fingered bound stalks of marijuana on sale with the vegetables.

Phnom Penh is more prosperous than it has been since 1975, when the Khmer Rouge came to power, banished city dwellers and intellectuals to the countryside and killed millions in a misguided experiment in agrarian revolution. People began returning to Phnom Penh in 1979, when Vietnamese forces drove the Khmer Rouge into exile.

Vitality and Despair

In Cambodia, a country of 7 million people living close to the edge, fortune is mixed. An atmosphere of vitality has come to the capital, but hunger and disease are never far away. Rains have come to the capital, but the surrounding provinces are withering under the drought that has devastated large parts of Asia this year.

“Even if we plant in the next week,” Premier Hun Sen said on another dry day in late September, “the yield will be far below expectations.”

The drought is the worst in 10 years. In late August, the government appealed to international organizations for food grains, fertilizer and insecticides. But some outsiders regard the government’s figures with suspicion, and no large-scale aid is yet on the way.

“We have a lot of problems we have to solve at the same time,” Hun Sen observed.

There are, for instance, the continuing guerrilla war against the Vietnamese-backed regime and the reconstruction of the roads, buildings, schools and industry damaged in earlier fighting.

Even if late rains come, the country’s irrigation systems cannot adequately store or move the water.

“Irrigation systems? There are none,” a harried foreign relief worker scoffed.

In Takeo province, not the worst-hit by any means, dry rice paddies stretch toward the horizon. Here and there, one or two squares on a checkerboard, bright-green young rice is growing where some industrious farm family has hauled water in from a distant source. Other patches stand dry beside a partially filled pond, perhaps abandoned by families that have moved to Phnom Penh seeking relief.

“This year, there will not be sufficient rice even for the province,” said Sun Sokhon, deputy director of the Communist Party’s provincial committee.

The province target, he said, was to plant 153,000 hectares (2.47 hectares make an acre), but only 31,260 hectares had been planted by late September. If there is late, heavy rain, the figure would rise to no more than 100,000, he said, and that would be mostly short-term, low-yield rice.

No Rice Surplus This Year

In 1985 and 1986, the province produced a rice surplus, but this year Takeo will sell no rice to the state for distribution in Phnom Penh and as rations to state workers. This means that the province will not receive the lumber, iron rods and bricks the state normally gives it in return for rice.

In an effort to get by, the 570,000 people of the province have fallen back on growing vegetables and making handicrafts. There is talk that the government may offer food rice in exchange for seed rice, out of fear that the hungry populace may start eating the seed crop, imperiling future plantings. Cambodia’s insufficient stock of draft animals has already fallen prey to food-short farmers, according to relief workers in the capital.

Another victim of the drought may be the defensive wall of tank traps and mine fields the government is building along the Thai border to discourage guerrilla infiltration--the so-called K-5 plan.

“We cannot send men this year for K-5,” the provincial official said. The men are busy growing vegetables and watching for rain.

No More Fortune-Tellers

“In former times,” he said, “the people believed in fortune-tellers. They would pray to God for rain. Now the people have higher knowledge. They depend on the meteorologist.”

He insisted that the anti-government guerrillas pose no problem in Takeo--”too flat; no place to hide.” But there is another menace here--disease. Malaria is a problem in the jungled mountains, tuberculosis and malnutrition in the flatlands. An occasional light-brown head among the normally black-haired Cambodian children testifies to the poor diet.

At the provincial hospital, the director, Nor Samith, a 43-year-old Cambodian-trained surgeon, said that malaria--the deadly falciparum, or malignant malaria--is a major problem among workers who “volunteered for their patriotic duty” with the K-5 forces in the West. He said he was still performing amputations on farmers and children wounded by shells left by what Cambodians call the civil war, the 1970-75 struggle between the U.S.-backed Lon Nol government and the Vietnamese and Cambodian Communist forces.

The surgeon led a visitor through a four-bed ward and said, pointing: “That man, a liver abscess. I operated yesterday. That woman, Caesarean. We did her this morning. And that man, pre-coma. Malaria.”

On the floor beside the malaria victim a young girl slept, probably a relative, covered with a sarong cloth. In one of her arms lay a malnourished infant, fidgeting as flies darted about his eyes.

In Phnom Penh, at the 500-bed hospital built by the Soviets in 1958, the director, Chey Vithia, said of the prewar days: “There were a number of Soviet specialists on staff then. People used to come here from Hong Kong and Singapore for treatment.”

Soviet doctors still work at the hospital, the country’s largest, but the building has not weathered well. The halls are unswept and the patients no longer come from abroad.

“Dengue fever has been the big problem this year,” the director said, “that and the complications of malnutrition like diarrhea.”

The health statistics are depressing for the 700,000 citizens of the capital, but outside the bamboo curtains of the small, crowded apartments the city is active.

“I have never seen such heavy traffic in the streets,” a diplomat said, “even on the main roads coming from the provinces.”

You can hear the commerce: the painful shrieking of a hog being hauled to market strapped to the back of a bicycle; the sound of Japanese motorbikes; the bang of hammer on metal at street-side repair shops.

Private Business Encouraged

In February, 1986 the government adopted a policy of encouraging private business in an effort to vitalize an economic system mired in socialist enterprise. Since then the state’s big, ochre-painted central market has not changed. In the hot afternoons, salesgirls lean over the glass countertops, dozing in the absence of customers for the few shoddy goods.

“I think if this place was private, it would be bankrupt,” said a Cambodian passing through the nearly empty aisles.

But not far away, on a street named for former French leader Charles de Gaulle, business is steady. In one block, private businessmen sell picture frames--”100 riels for the frame, and that includes the picture (of Karl Marx)”--and repair motorcycles and radios. A machine shop turns out spare parts for bicycles. A sign painter keeps busy supplying the new merchants. (The official rate for the riel is 30 to $1; on the black market, a dollar brings 120 or more.)

Lee Meng, a tailor, said that word-of-mouth advertising has brought him business from all over Phnom Penh. He charges 300 riels for a pair of pants and 200 for a custom-made shirt and turns a profit despite rent and taxes totaling more than 3,000 riels a month.

State workers are paid about 250 riels a month and are given ration cards for subsidized rice, meat and fuel. But they moonlight at a variety of odd jobs--repairing radios, teaching languages, pedaling cyclos-- the three-wheeled bicycle-taxis that can bring in about 50 riels in four hours. State employees also sell, with government acquiescence, their extra food and fuel rations on the private market.

Foreigners in Phnom Penh say private businesses began here even before the government endorsed them. There is no official count, but the merchants and repair and service shops number in the hundreds. Most are family operations, but a handful are small factories recycling and refurbishing old machines.

The rise of private commerce and the drought have coincided with the rise in prices in the markets. The price of a kilogram (2.2 pounds) of second-grade rice has gone from 12 to 16 riels since the first of the year.

Per-kilo meat prices in the private markets in late September were 80 riels for chicken and 90 riels for pork. In a state store, the corresponding prices were 85 for chicken and 97 for pork, but a Cambodian shopper said that meat at the state store was of a lesser quality.

The constitution permits freedom of religion in this overwhelmingly Buddhist country, but under Communist rule, religion has been controlled. The monkhood is generally restricted to men over 50; monks are seldom seen outside the temple grounds, and temple buildings are used for state schools.

But the government, which has never been particularly popular, seems to have loosened the rules, at least in respect to religious services.