Doctoral Student Hart Feuer reporting from Cambodia

22 March 2010:
Phnom Penh, Cambodia

For me working and living in Cambodia is a constant reminder that research is not a sterile process; indeed, it's a test of one's ability to continually juggle contradictions of an academic and personal nature while in the field. This is my fourth time to Cambodia, but the one that has truly been a defining challenge for me as a researcher. With a personal attachment to Cambodia going back to 2004 and an even longer relationship with activist environmentalism, I've never been under the illusion that I am conducting an objective study of ecological agricultural movements in Cambodia. On the contrary, I've accepted that I am engaged on a level beyond research and that I can use that to my advantage, provided that I recognize this and proactively counteract it on my own and by consulting third parties for outside opinions. The benefit of this personal engagement is that I can use my own passion to motivate myself to be more in-depth, more embedded, and more ethical in my research. In fact, after seven months here, I have a sense of what it would be like to run a development project of my own -- and not just research about it. I consider that a valuable trade-off.

Sometimes that embeddedness has consequences, as I have found out on numerous occasions. On one such afternoon, I was interviewing a palm sugar producer in Kompong Chhnang province who was describing why he would give up his traditional artisanal craft for another job if he could. In Khmer, he insinuated that 'people' (and by this he was primarily referring foreigners) tend to romanticize his work without understanding how hard and dangerous it is to climb up and down thirty palm trees twice a day for half the year. Later, intent on learning what that meant by that, I endeavored to climb a palm tree myself. Since I am here to write the story, obviously the worst didn't happen -- but a bamboo ladder did break under me and left me with a deep cut and an infected foot for a week after. If any, my romantic ecological notions about his work went down with that broken ladder.

Yet, sometimes those consequences can be rewarding enough to make the difficulties I faced seem to be merely a case of bad luck. One such case occurred during part of a research experiment on organic rice marketing, in which I am testing how local eco-labeled products sell to lower class and poor urban families. As I was delivering organic rice to a partnered trader in a wet market, a customer approached and politely asked what we were selling. After the trader explained what organic meant, the woman smiled and responded (in quote), "Finally! I have been waiting for this kind of health product since 1979 [when the revolution ended]." Five minutes later, I helped her load a 20kg bag onto her bicycle and sent her off with a warm smile.

If I look back on my childhood, my PhD topic seems to be almost a direct response to the agricultural system I saw around me. On the one hand, I grew up in the USA where only 2% of people are farmers and ecological movements are merely a niche within the industrial system of agriculture that is dependent on foreign labor. On the other hand, I grew up in Israel, a country lacking in land that nevertheless romanticizes farming as part of its communal heritage and yet has the most modern farming apparatus in the world. The distinction between those two places was always clear to me but its importance in the context of development did not emerge until I began reading about the long-term shortcomings of agricultural industrialization during the so-called Green Revolution. The topic crystallized when I discovered the works of Franz Huber while researching the social precedents of the German environmental movement. He described the process of 'ecological modernization' - which I found intuitive and compelling. But Huber was referring to post-industrial societies, which was hardly relevant for international development. So I turned his idea on its head, reinventing the concept of 'ecological modernization' to apply to the pro-active modernization of agriculture through ecological innovation.

Cambodia, coincidentally, was a perfect testing ground for this theory. During the heyday of the Green Revolution, it was mired in revolution and never followed the models of agricultural industrialization that spread throughout most of the rest of Asia. Indeed, Cambodia had simply not chosen a path for agricultural development and, at the same time, post-development theory had already thrown out the unquestioned utility of green revolution agriculture. Here was a chance to study how the kind of ecological innovations that Israel can be so proud of could be a fundamental building block of agricultural development rather than a niche movement, as I found in the USA. The rest of the story is PhD history.

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