‘Not enough water’: Cambodian farmers face changing climate | Economy

Tonle Sap, Cambodia – In Cambodia’s monsoon season, the backyard of Sam Vongsay, a rice farmer, is filled with water and plastic garbage from the residents of their homes as Tonle Sap Lake grows as the Mekong River floods.

But in the dry half of the year, which runs from December to May, Vongsay is unlikely to be able to access a drop of lake water from a house in Chong Khneas, 220 km (137 miles) northwest of the capital Phnom Penh.

The 40-year-old farmer has no viable wells or equipment to pump lake water to his property 2 km (1.2 miles) away, and he blames farmers for channeling a large portion of the river’s upstream flow to irrigate crops.

“The water is not enough to flow down the river because other farmers across the river are also blocking the water,” Vongsay told Al Jazeera.

In the past, Vongsay and his family could cultivate two seasons of rice, but in recent years, poor rainfall and poor water infrastructure have made it difficult to manage a single crop. Vongsay said he tried to grow chilli last year to diversify his crop, but the plants withered and died.

“We don’t have enough water infrastructure,” he said. “If we had that, we wouldn’t just grow rice, we’d grow rice and other vegetables three or four times a year.”

Farmers on the largest freshwater lake in Southeast Asia are facing an increasing threat to their livelihoods as demand for land increases. droughts attributed to climate change and the development of hydraulic energy suppresses the precious water supply.

Since 2018, Tonle Sap’s volume has fallen below the historical average, a Mekong River Commission (MRC) report He studied water levels from November 2020 to May last year.

The lake was hit by a severe drought in 2019, as well as the Mekong River-based system, leaving a lasting impact on water levels. In January 2020, the volume of the lake was about 6 billion cubic meters, slightly more than a third of the average volume for the dry season, according to the MRC.

Van Ra, a 44-year-old Siem Reap rice farmer, said the weather in Al Jazeera had not improved since the 2019 drought, with last year’s seasonal winds and rains putting seeds in the dry season underground.

Ra tried to plant rice twice last year to cover the costs of renting her land and spraying fertilizer, which she has to do more often due to inclement weather.

“It was useless because I had almost nothing to harvest,” he said. “It’s impossible to do it twice because there isn’t enough water.”

Population growth and rising land prices have led to a rush to clear the area’s forests for housing and agricultural land, and the lake and its tributaries have created more water demand.

The lake, whose seasonal flooding is linked to melting snow in the Tibet Autonomous Region of China and Yunnan Province, is also at risk of expanding the development of the hydroelectric dam, which scientists have linked to unpredictable water levels in the Mekong.

Although farmers have felt increasing pressure on their livelihoods, the Tonle Sap fishing industry, which produces 500,000 tonnes of fish a year, has also been affected. reporting smaller catches, taking some fishermen to fish farms or farms.

Brian Eyler, author of Last Days of the Mighty Mekong, told Al Jazeera that in addition to the Mekong hydroelectric dams, smaller reservoirs created to meet the needs of farmers — often without official permission — were putting pressure on the lake.

“These reservoirs are effectively stealing water from nearby communities and blocking critical fish migration routes in the world’s largest inland fisheries,” Eyler said.

Vongsay, a farmer in Tonle Sap, said that in 2019 he and other farmers needed to help them get more water.

Rice farmer Sam Vongsay and his family are surviving on a side business by making Buddhist holiday decorations [Courtesy of Danielle Keeton-Olsen]

“We first agreed that digging deeper into the canal would be fine, but we didn’t expect it to be so deep,” Vongsay said, explaining that he could not direct the rented tractor to work the rice field along the widened canal. .

Vongsay said he and his family were making a living from a side business making Buddhist holiday decorations.

Chea Seila, a researcher at the Wonders of the Wonders project at the U.S. International Development Agency’s Mekong project, told Al Jazeera that the combined effects of Tonle Sap’s climate change, deforestation and infrastructure development showed authorities needed to better understand the country’s delicate nature. developing water supply and solutions that take these factors into account.

“It’s interconnected. When people use it without saving and restoring more water, there will not be enough land and surface water, ”he said. “Also [if] we have enough irrigation infrastructure, we don’t have water [groundwater] spring as well as rain. It is still difficult to get enough water for the whole year [will be] in the future. “