In Cambodia, agriculture plays a main role to ensure food secu rity and contribute to economic growth. Currently, this sector is strongly impacted by natural disasters (drought, flood and increasing insect pests and diseases) caused by climate change influencing farmer livelihoods. Therefore, this research was conduct ed to investigate farmer’s agricultural practices, determine the impact of climate change on these practices, and to know how farmers adapt to climate change. 180 farmer households were selected to do individual interviews. Of 180 households, 90 households were defined as poor (ID poor) by Ministry of Planning and 90 households were common farmers. Semi – structured interviews were conducted with key main informants such as district governor, chief of commune, commune council and chief of village. The results demonstrated that both types of farmers mainly depend on rice cultivation in wet season. Most of the farmers use conventional practices and some farmers still use traditional agriculture equipments and animals (cow) in their rice production. Almost all th e farmers use direct – seeding technique in growing rice. Because of the natural disasters, farmers don’t want to invest money in agriculture production. The natural disasters (drought and flood) and insect pests destroyed rice production every year since 20 10. To adapt to current climate change situation, half of the interviewed farmers have changed their rice varieties. Some farmers dig small ditches to mitigate the drought and flood and nearly half of interviewed farmers allow their family members to migra te to find a job in order to earn money for supporting daily livelihood and for starting up agriculture production again next year.

Increasing natural disasters from year to year in the study area is the main obstacle of development in agriculture leading to food insecurity and increasing migration. The number of migration at the Thailand border will increase if the natural hazard become more extremely.

To solve these problems, the authors proposes three recommendations to the Royal Government of Cambodia and development partner:
  • enhance providing accurate information of natural disaster prediction in the area which helps farmer to prepare their agriculture production before natural disaster happen and providing support during and after natural disasters happened.
  • agriculture production should be recovered after natural disaster happen and farmer should be encouraged to invest more on agriculture production through establishing agriculture insurance services
  • Agriculture techniques should be developed from conventional practices to more intensive technique to improve land and labor productivities and water resources management should be improved as well

September 2, 2016September 2, 20160
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