created by StovepipeCats on 24/01/2025 at 13:58 UTC
1202 upvotes, 5 top-level comments (showing 5)
I recently watched The Killing Fields (1984) and Year Zero: The Silent Death of Cambodia (1979), which both depict Cambodians in huge numbers being forced to work in rice fields during the Khmer Rouge's rule from 1975-1979. If there were so many more people working in food production and most of these people were malnourished, it begs the question of what happened to the additional food that was presumably being produced by the addition of hundreds of thousands or millions of people to the agricultural labor force.
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Comment by Davincier at 24/01/2025 at 16:23 UTC*
1404 upvotes, 4 direct replies
First problem was the method of agriculture they practised. Pol Pot strongly believed in the nobility of the simple farmer and thus they practised a back to basics platform. All agriculture was thus done with 'primitive' tools. Think of all the cars used in modern agriculture for transportation of goods. Those were melted down for simple ploughshares and ox-carts (despite a lack of oxen). Think of all the advanced tools, those were no longer allowed.
Then picture rice paddies, traditionally small plots which followed the terrain. Those were levelled and amalgamated into one hectare square fields, even if it made no sense for the terrain. This wasted a tremendous amount of time although it was easier to irrigate and plough.
But then the huge populace, what were they doing? The problem there was that they at first were unequally divided. You had regions that were doing well in producing rice, and others that were doing poorly. However, Pol Pot did not want (and perhaps could not) redistribute the rice. When Pol Pot observed the inequality he thus thought of a solution, he would simply redistribute the population. This was done exactly during harvest season and the crops died. Mistakes like this were endemic to the regime.
One should also remember that a considerable part of the population were considered 'traitors'. The Khmer Rouge made the distinction between the 'new' (bad) and 'base' (good) people. One was considered loyal and to be fed, the other to be punished. The primary method of punishment was hunger. Thus even if food was there, people were kept on a starvation diet. They were also overworked as punishment, even if the work wasn't productive due to hunger and a lack of strength and tools. And remember, those considered loyal or important were given normal diets. Think of railwaymen, archaeologists, some factory workers, artists, those high in the regime, the prince and so on. While the amount of people that got this normal diet shrunk over time, it still led to an initial inequality.
Some rice was also sold abroad, to Madagascar, Senegal and Singapore. But it was a drop in the bucket.
All this put together, what was the primary reason for the low production? Well, simply put. They didn't produce as much as both the regime and outside observers believed. The youngest and strongest hands were kept busy making irrigation works (which were actually a lot better than the nation had previously known) and thus not available for harvest and planting. The harvest and planting was left to the rest, who had no incentive to put in extra work. They received the same starvation portions no matter how hard they worked and if they worked less they would conserve strength. They were sick, weakly, underfed and no less important had no actual knowledge of agriculture. The local cadres would be punished if they didn't meet targets, and thus reported meeting the targets and send the needed amount of rice to stockpiles, no matter if that led to local shortages exacerbating the local issues. Many hands do not actually make light work in this case.
Source: Pol Pot: The history of a Nightmare by Philip Short Various Cambodian museum inscriptions
Comment by ShadowsofUtopia at 25/01/2025 at 00:00 UTC*
51 upvotes, 1 direct replies
It is interesting that you mentioned John Pilger's documentary, I recently wrote about this for a substack article.
So the reasons for the famine in 1979, particularly in October 1979 (about ten months since the regime had actually fallen to the Vietnamese) when Pilger was filming the documentary, is that the rice harvest at the end of 1978 and start of 1979 had essentially been abandoned, left to rot, as the chaos of the end of the regime left many either returning to their homes in Phnom Penh, fleeing to Thailand as refugees, or being coralled to a new Khmer Rouge encampment on the Thai border.
Compounding this issue was the arrival of aid, which was painfully slow, as well as the Vietnamese themselves having taken a percentage of the food stockpile to Vietnam.
I might as well add here, although it is a bit of a tangent.
Neither the Khmer Rouge, nor Pol Pot, ever declared "Year Zero", and never used the phrase, despite it appearing several times in Pilger's documentary. He himself may have simply borrowed the title of Francois Ponchaud's book of the same name which had come out the year before, but that doesn't explain his insistence that the Khmer Rouge themselves 'proclaimed it'. Similarly this meme now appears everywhere, and while it does a good job of conveying the project (to an extent, in that the KR wanted to 'wipe the slate clean', as it were) notions that the Khmer Rouge wanted to live in the stone age or that they were primitivists is not correct.
Another thing to add is that overall 'depictions' of the *entire* regime are hard to produce. If you read different memoirs and histories you'll see that some areas, some zones, were better than others in terms of the food supply, some villages were worse than others. It is hard to place a uniform experience on the entire country during that four years. Someone in Takeo might have had a much different experience to someone in Battambang, and or even within a zone one village leader might have been more ruthless and horrible than the next. Some rules were interpreted differently in one place or another, although I suppose this is pretty well depicted in "the Killing Fields".
Comment by breadsmith11 at 25/01/2025 at 01:58 UTC
16 upvotes, 0 direct replies
What happened to all the rice?
As a bit of intertextual reference, you can read the biography of Haing Ngor, who plays Dith Pran in The Killing Fields (1984). He was there too and survived being pressed into farming under the Khmer Rouge. Cambodia is a fertile land and is definitely capable of producing enough rice for its citizens and to produce a surplus. So Cambodians who were out there in the fields also asked "what happened to all the rice?"
In the biography, Ngor talks about how after the first big harvest in 1975, the villagers were relieved and looked forward to eating it the next day, having stocked all the grain in the local village warehouse. But the following day, the villagers wake up and find the warehouse empty. They do not know where it went and it's clear that trucks have come overnight and shipped them off somewhere else. This experience is corroborated in other survivor testimonies.
To connect the dots of "what happened to the rice" (for an essay I wrote at university) I cited Khieu Samphan's doctoral thesis, where he describes Cambodia as economically underdeveloped due to prolonged exploitation by France, and by historical marginalised due to conquests by Siam and Vietnam. He notes that Cambodia's only major commodity is rice. Khieu Samphan would be in charge of economic policy after the revolution. My claim is that Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge planned to jump start their economic and military development by funding it with the export of rice. So the question of where did the rice go - is answered by saying it was exported, ostensibly to fund Cambodia's future development. It's also easy to make the claim that they found it easy to take rice away from the "new people" (the citizens forced out of the urban areas to work the farms), because they were considered enemies or undesired people, so they wouldn't budget for rice allocation to these people. So they starved these workers and exported the excess.
Where was it exported to? At this stage I have lost the citation - it may have been François Poinchard's work or a different one, but there were records of exports of white rice and broken rice to eastern bloc nations such as China and Romania. The main thing (I claim) they would've been importing in return was weapons and ammunition, in preparation for a military confrontation with Vietnam - which we know eventually came in 1979 due to Pol Pot's long term hatred for Vietnam and its leadership.
In 1977 and later, there genuinely is a crop failure for a range of reasons, but I won't go into it as I don't have any further sources. This coincides with the intra-party political violence which you would see in historical sites like Tuol Sleng - cadres purging other cadres to try and find "saboteurs" who caused the crop failure. But I think you can probably think of a few other reasons why the harvest in 1977 was insufficient.
Comment by [deleted] at 25/01/2025 at 06:16 UTC
4 upvotes, 1 direct replies
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