CNBC Claims ‘Climate Change’ Hurting Cambodia’s Crops. It’s Not
A story published by CNBC claims ‘climate change’ is damaging Cambodia’s crops by making it hard for farmers and fishers to pay back loans they’ve taken out against their assets. This is false.
Some Cambodian farmers and fishers may be finding it difficult to pay back loans they have taken out to finance production. This is a problem for many farmers the world over.
However, the production of Cambodia’s major crops has increased significantly since 1990.
As a result, agriculturalists’ financial difficulties are due to factors other than ‘climate change’ hampering crop production, because it is not.
Jenni Read, the author of the CNBC story, titled “Hit by climate change, farmers in Cambodia are risking everything on microfinance loans,” claims:
Crop failures due to erratic weather and wildfires are leading farmers to take out loans to survive, with their land.
The “microfinance” industry — long touted as a way to help poor, rural communities in developing countries — is pushing tens of thousands of farming families into debt traps as they attempt to adapt to a changing climate, according to a report.
Read cites a study produced with funding from the NGO, UK Research and Innovation’s Global Challenges Research Fund, as the basis of her report.
An organisation that is clearly promoting the ‘climate emergency’.
Like agriculture in neighboring Vietnam and nearby Thailand, Cambodian food production is reliant on seasonal monsoons.
Climate Realism previously refuted claims that climate change has undermined crop production in Cambodia, Thailand, and Vietnam by making monsoons more erratic.
Since climate change is not worsening weather trends in the region those countries inhabit, it can’t be undercutting food production—and the data confirms it isn’t, contrary to CNBC’s claim.
Among Cambodia’s top crops are rice and cassava. Data from the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) demonstrate that between 1990 and 2020, the production of each of those crops has broken records for yearly production multiple times.
The FAO’s data shows rice production increased by approximately 350 percent since 1990, and cassava production grew by an amazing 12,527 percent. (see the figure immediately below).
Fruit production is also critical to Cambodia’s agricultural sector, most of which is consumed domestically.
Banana is among Cambodia’s top fruit crop and like rice and cassava, during the most recent 30 years, banana production has regularly set new records for production.
Indeed, banana production in Cambodia increased by just under 161 percent since 1990. (see the figure immediately below).
Fish make up the largest percentage of protein in the average Cambodian’s diet. Data shows that fish harvests, both wild and produced via aquaculture, have been increasing.
The U.N. FAO doesn’t keep records of seafood production, however, the South Asian Fisheries Development Center has, until recently, for the region.
Its data show that between 2009 and 2017, the last year of available data, inland and marine capture of fish, and aquaculture production have all increased substantially, producing an overall increase in fish production topping 66 percent. (See the graphic below).
There is no evidence whatsoever that ‘climate change’ is undermining Cambodian farmers’ abilities to pay back existing loans or forcing them to undertake new ones.
The data clearly demonstrate that across the range of Cambodia’s most critical foodstuff, from cereal crops to root vegetables to fruits to fish production has increased dramatically during the period of recent modest warming.
This is fact-based good news that CNBC could have, and should have, reported.
Unfortunately, rather than checking the facts, which would have undermined its continuing trend of reporting false climate alarms, CNBC chose to promote the alarmist narrative of impending climate doom, this time as promoted by a climate NGO in the U.K.
Bad form, CNBC, bad form.
See more here climatechangedispatch
Header image: openpr.com
Please Donate Below To Support Our Ongoing Work To Defend The Scientific Method
PRINCIPIA SCIENTIFIC INTERNATIONAL, legally registered in the UK as a company 
incorporated for charitable purposes. Head Office: 27 Old Gloucester Street, London WC1N 3AX.
Trackback from your site.
Tom
| #
The fickleness of weather (not climate) has been the bane of farmers since the beginning of agriculture. Lending to farmers has been a way of grabbing their land for almost as long – one only needs to make loans for a few years before bad weather causes a crop failure, then the compound interest on the loan puts the farmer into a debt trap. Eventually the lender claims the collateral (the land) and the farmer becomes a sharecropper on his own land. This system was a major driver of discontent in Vietnam that led to the Communists taking over. The real problem for farmers isn’t “climate” as CNBC claims, it’s how the monetary system and compound interest tip the playing field to favor urban absentee landlords over the farmers actually growing the food.
Reply