The Warming Felt ’Round the World
We’re going to start off in Cambodia again this month, if that is agreeable with you. The country is in the midst of an agrian transition. While 65 percent of the country is still involved in agriculture, the methods are changing.
Rice is the staple crop, and boy, oh boy can’t you tell. I swear, you eat probably four cups of it at each meal. It is the most important ingredient in terms of food security to families.
But rice is also a financial instrument. It might be used to pay interest on loans between friends and family. It might be sold to buy gas to send children to school. And there are increasingly more financial inputs, rather than natural ones, on the production end of rice farming. In the past decade or two, farming in Cambodia has become increasingly individualized, financialized and commercialized.
Almost all the families my college classmates and I talked to had been part of labor exchange groups before switching to using wage labor and service providers during the past 20 years. Under the labor-exchange system, families in villages worked one another’s farms during transplanting and harvest season. But now Cambodian villages are increasingly integrated into the national economy and villagers feel they must free up their labor. Rather than form labor exchange groups, they rely on hired help. They go into debt to rent or buy combine harvesters and power tillers to do the work in much less time.
This was a logic I didn’t understand. There are not many jobs to be had, especially in the rural areas. So they’ve freed up their labor, but most can’t enter the formal workforce and are increasingly in debt. And now all their neighbors don’t do exchange labor, so they can’t go back to the groups. Every year, they must hope for a good harvest, a bounty of boom-bust crops, or go further into debt to buy pesticides and seeds and pay agricultural service providers. It’s a viscious yearly cycle these families cannot find a way out of. They sense that the economic future is not in agriculture, but cannot act on that sense.
I think similar patterns are playing out globally. Let’s take Maine’s iconic lobsters. Lobstermen are catching more now than they were in the ’80s, but there has been a 40 percent decrease in the amount of juvenile lobsters found in the Gulf of Maine in the last three years. We know the lobster population is crawling to colder waters up north, with potentially catastrophic consequences for Maine’s fishery. And yet, what is there to do? And how do we even admit it to ourselves?
It’s been a weird couple of winters, hasn’t it? Much less snow, 40 degree days in January… What happened to tough old rugged, frostbitten Maine? Has your house ever flooded before? Mine hadn’t, but our basement — on the top of a hill, I might add — has been feeling mighty damp this winter.
And now that I think of it, all the fishermen we talked to in Cambodia said it had been a weird couple years there, too. Less of a difference between seasons, more intense rainfall and droughts, fewer fish. Down in the Mekong Delta, in Vietnam, we heard about houses on the riverbanks being washed away by the surging water, highways flooded up to your chest becoming a seasonal occurrence.
So now we face the age old question: What do we do with all the old coal miners? What do the fishermen do? How should these Cambodian farmers adapt? Are we hoping everyone just finds their own solution? Is it every man and woman for themself? Are we all striving, like the Kathadin region, to overcome our closed-papermill doldrums and become a tourist destination?
I often think I would be a good TV writer, because I can predict with startling accuracy what line will be spoken next. We love patterns, cliché, normalcy. It is then certainly a very difficult time to be human. If I were to write this story by predicting the next line, it would not be a happy ending. We’re like ouroboros, eating our own tail. Even when we know what is good for us, we can’t see any path but straight ahead.
