Land Commodification, State Formation, and Agrarian Capitalism: The Political Economy of Land Governance in Cambodia

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. Land designation of what are known as economic land concessions (ELCs), hydropower dams, and protected areas has placed limits on land use and undermined tenure security for many smallholder farmers. Both landlessness-standing at 29 percent in 2011-and the proportion of farmers with less than one hectare of land have increased since the 1990s (Phann et al. 2015), reaching 46 percent in 2013 (National Institute of Statistics