BOOK CHAPTER: Land Commodification, State Formation, and Agrarian Capitalism: The Political Economy of Land Governance in Cambodia
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Publication date: September 2022
Publication: Turning Land into Capital: Development and Dispossession in the Mekong Region
Chapter title: Grounding Land Justice: Contested Principles, Processes, and Outcomes
Authors: Jean-Christophe Diepart and Carl Middleton
Editors: Philip Hirsch, Kevin Woods, Natalia Scurrah and Michael B. Dwyer
See more details on the book here.
In Cambodia, the enclosure, commodification and concentration of ownership of agricultural and forest land has accelerated since the 1990s. In the process, smallholder farmers have been pushed into the margins of Cambodia’s national development. Commodification of land in Cambodia is proceeding through three distinct processes. The first process couples the titling of land with the creation of land and credit markets and is most closely associated with the formalization of smallholder land in the country’s lowland agricultural plains. A second process of land commodification relates to Cambodia’s deepening integration into regional agricultural commodity trade, particularly with China, Thailand and Vietnam. The third process is state-sanctioned large-scale economic land concessions (ELCs) that enclose and license large parcels of land and then channel national and transnational investments into such concessions. In this chapter we argue that these three processes of land commodification and capitalization are central characteristics of Cambodia’s particular form of agrarian capitalism and state formation. We show that these processes are neither coherent institutionally nor well-articulated spatially, but none the less are central to Cambodia’s state formation. They sometimes come into conflict with one another and are heavily contested, as seen for example in recent efforts by the State to address tensions between agribusiness companies and smallholder farmers.
Please contact Dr. Carl Middleton for more information.
Citation: Diepart, J-C. and Middleton, C. (2022) “Land Commodification, State Formation, and Agrarian Capitalism: The Political Economy of Land Governance in Cambodia” in Dwyer, M., Hirsch, P., Scurrah, N., and Woods, K. (eds.) Turning Land into Capital: Development and Dispossession in the Mekong Region. University of Washington Press: Seattle.
