Browsing by Subject "Cambodia"

Food has featured in the global development agenda for several decades. However, increasing food prices and the global food crisis of 2007-2008, fuelled the debate around food security, which was also one the main thematic priorities of Finn Church Aid's strategy in 2009-2012. This thesis was commissioned by FCA in order to examine food security in the context of their development cooperation project in Cambodia. The purpose of the study is to support FCA and their local partner organization, the Lutheran World Federation Cambodia’s work on food security. The study has two objectives: to contribute to the understanding of the intertwined issues of rural development and food security, and to the understanding of the food security approach and intervention logics. Firstly, food reality is scrutinized in a Cambodian rural village. The focus is on the functioning of the food system at the local level, and as part of a wider food system reaching beyond the village boundaries and even the national level. In addition, the household level food security is analysed from the perspective of livelihoods - means of gaining a living - and different ways of commanding or accessing food. This level allows scrutinizing how village level changes in the food system affect different kinds of families. Secondly, the study analyses the food security approach of LWF, with regard to the village food reality and in the light of politicised international discourses on food security. The thesis is a contextual case study of the village of Chrokhlong, based on one month’s field work period in November and December 2010, as well as LWF Cambodia’s program documents and interviews with the staff. The field work material consists of 43 interviews with the villagers, 76 informal discussions and personal observation. Food security and general development themes in Cambodia are explored through literature and personal interviews. The study found that the local food security is affected by important changes of the wider food system. Population growth and economic liberalization increase pressures on land and natural resources in the village context. Accumulation and fragmentation of land and degradation of common resources are related to the increasing commoditization of the village food system. Food security has become an issue of purchasing power. Land for rice cultivation appears as the most important factor contributing to household food security. The most food insecure families lack land and means of generating incomes in order to purchase food, such as family members in working age and good health. The poorest families are the most affected by the depletion of common resources and the increasing food prices. At a strategic level, LWF has adopted a holistic approach to food security and defines their objective as 'right to food' in line with a rights based approach to development. However, at the practical level the approach seems narrower, and the work on food security focuses on enhancing food production. This focus risks not taking into account the food insecurity of the land-poor families who do not benefit from increasing productivity. The centrality of the land issue and the specific situation of the most food insecure families is no considered sufficiently. Based on this case study, an integrated and holistic rural development approach would seem to provide relatively more benefits to households that are able to produce to markets, while the food security of the poorest families can be even further threatened by a greater dependence of markets. While LWF’s ideals seem to reflect a 'food justice' discourse, their practical work is more in line with the hegemonic discourse labelled as 'food security', that does not aim at affecting the structural causes of food insecurity at different levels.

Carbon markets form a fundamental part of green economy, that is supposed to bring the world out of climate crisis, while maintaining economic growth and human well-being. This thesis contributes to the critical research on the green economy assumptions and draws from the political-ecological literature. It explores voluntary carbon markets with qualitative methods, through a case study of a production chain of carbon credits starting from their production in the Cardamom Mountains, Cambodia and ending in their buying and re-sale by the Compensate foundation in Finland. The focus of the analysis are the representations needed to create supply and demand for the carbon credit, and their effects. The thesis examines the complexity of commodification of carbon credits. Carbon offsets rely on highly technical auditing schemes. To produce carbon credits with forestry projects, the project developers must describe a “baseline”. The baseline describes a threat, which the relevant area is facing, and the conservation organization can tackle. I analyse how the representations of the threat make the conservation area governable and justify intervention and how they, at the same time, are unable to include the wider context, so they leave important drivers of deforestation unaddressed and instead target small-scale activities of individuals and local communities. Similarly, I show how in order to sell such carbon credits, climate change must be represented as a problem that can be solved by individual climate action of responsible consumers rather than as a systemic problem. As an effect, both the production and sale of carbon credits have a strong focus on targeting individuals at the expense of leaving broader societal structures unaddressed. This thesis highlights that the global North’s ability and moral justification to continue high-carbon lifestyles through offsets, requires people living in the global South to change their livelihoods and environments. Even if the communities in the conservation areas have some power to impact the ways the offset project operates, the level of optionality is much lower than in the global North, where the consumer is only subtly nudged to offset the distant damage they do. This approach is generally justified based on orientalist and neo-colonial discourses, according to which the people of the global South are unable to take care of their environments – and even themselves. The fact that no changes are demanded from the people of the global North and no existing power structures or practices are challenged arguably increases the desirability of the carbon markets as the major climate solution. This, however, also makes it justified to call carbon markets a non-transformative climate solution.