Resource information
The Strategic Framework for Food Security and Nutrition in Cambodia (SFFSN) is a cross-cutting strategy including action plan for the years from 2008 until 2012. The SFFSN goal is to achieve the state when, by 2012, poor and food-insecure Cambodians have substantially improved physical and economic access to sufficient, safe, and nutritious food to meet their dietary needs and food preferences for an active and healthy life.The objectives of the strategy related to help eliminating hunger, food insecurity and malnutrition include increasing food availability from agriculture and livestock production and from common property forests and fisheries resources. The SFFSN does not focus only on food production, but also on the improvement of the utilization of food resulting in reduced malnutrition, morbidity and mortality, particularly among women and children. Crop and livestock production are very important activities to meet directly the food and income needs of most rural Cambodian households. Many constraints contribute to low productivity and high risks in crop production. Agricultural land holdings are limited in size, with 48 percent of those owning land having a total of less than 1.0 hectare and often as little as less than 0.5 ha of crop land per household. Eighty percent of the national agricultural cropping area depends on rain-fed cultivation under erratic wet season rainfall, and these areas do not have the possibility of growing crops in the dry season. A rapidly increasing proportion of rural households now have no agricultural land at all. The strategy adopts gender-sensitive approach, recognizing particular vulnerability of women from small holds to food insecurity and adopting measures targeted to women and other vulnerable groups, such as scaling up investments in homestead food production/home gardening projects, prioritizing landless people, small holders and women.The strategy also provides measures to reduce rural poverty by stimulating rural employment, including casual wage labour in the informal sector and increasing micro-enterprise business opportunities for agricultural producers, including improving market access. SFFSN intervention in the area of rural employment is focused on the entire rural population. It also prioritizes livestock and agricultural extension services, farmer field-based education, training and field experiment services.Within the sphere of enabling more inclusive and efficient agricultural and food systems, the policy identifies such priority areas as: improving market infrastructure in food-insecure areas including market buildings, bulk storage facilities, and market electricity and water supply; to prioritise poor and food-insecure communes for investments in tertiary rural road improvements; to continue progress in land titling for land rights for the rural poor, including private land titling for agricultural land, Social Concessions, allocation of communal rights to land in upland minority communities, and considering gender equity in the land titling process.
