Agriculture & Agro-Processing

CAPRED aims to foster a more sustainable and prosperous agricultural sector in Cambodia by empowering small-scale producers, enhancing market competitiveness, and improving the livelihoods of farming households.

Our work in agriculture and agro-processing focuses on 6 priority crops: rice, cashew, banana, mango, cassava and vegetables. These cover more than 90% of Cambodia’s total cropping area and are dominated by small-scale growers. They offer enormous potential in increased sales and productivity; export growth; import substitution; and gender equality, disability and social inclusion (GEDSI) benefits.

We adopt an integrated value chain or market system approach for each crop from market (upstream) to production (downstream). Each market is made up of a series of transactions governed by supply and demand.

We examine market needs and work backwards to improve and strengthen the supply chain.

MARKET SYSTEM APPROACH

Strengthening upstream and downstream sectors

In our model, the upstream sector covers processing, compliance, labelling and/or packaging, marketing and distribution before products go to market. This sector contributes to skilled employment, technical expertise and quality standards. Strengthening this sector can increase value addition, competitiveness and market access that in turn contributes to employment, economic growth, production and crop diversification.

The downstream sector covers primary agricultural production activities. These include research and development of better farming techniques or machinery, climate- or pest-resilient seeds, sustainable practices, improved irrigation systems, farming and harvesting crops, and enhanced post-harvest handling and storage facilities. Strengthening the downstream sector has a positive ripple effect on the entire supply chain.

For Cambodia, the key challenge is to grow its value addition sector rather than sell raw produce to Thailand and Vietnam who then benefit from processing it themselves. Value addition requires a significant improvement in processing efficiency, affordable processing equipment, and use of wastage, ensuring that farming households receive better prices for their products and can rely on stable market access.