 As I started to get more and more interested in how Erie's work, the first class research, varietal improvement, agronomy, engineering, all of this, how this could be more relevant to different countries, particularly countries that I would say have been bypassed by the Green Revolution that hadn't really taken off to the same degree for a number of reasons, partly because of their environment, because they were largely rain-fed areas, but also because of conflict. And that's what got me interested in the Indochina region. January 1986, I was invited by Dr. Swaminathan to be part of a team that went to Cambodia, then known as Kampuchea. And it was GoDev Kush, it was Don Puckridge and myself. And so we went there for about 10 days in January 1986. It had been a request from the Ministry of Agriculture. It had initially actually come from some NGOs working in Cambodia. They wanted Erie, they were asking Erie to return some of the seeds that we had in the gene bank. They were interested in getting the rice industry up and running again after a long period of great disruption actually to rice farming in the country. So we went on in that first mission and lots of interesting things came of that as a result. It's a remarkable story and one that I wish more people knew about that because it is such a compelling example of how genetic conservation is so critical, particularly for countries like Cambodia that are so reliant on agriculture and in this case so reliant on rice production. So Cambodia has, one would call it quite a checkered history, leading up to the end of the Vietnam War. Actually the country was very productive, not necessarily high yielding, but they were generating surpluses of rice from Cambodia leading up to about 72, 73 as the Vietnam War was sort of coming to an end but it was spilling over into Cambodia and Laos. And so at one point, sort of in the late 60s, the country had an area of around two and a half million hectares of rice and they were actually exporting small amounts of that to other parts of the world, particularly to Africa actually. But as the war spilled over and there was a very strong anti-government movement going on in the rural areas, more and more people, more and more Cambodians actually fled the countryside and made their way into Phnom Penh and they sought refuge there actually. So the population of the city increased from half a million to about two million people and at the same time the area planted to rice decreased and decreased and decreased, large areas were affected by landmines as the conflict was going on. So Cambodia went from being a net surplus country to being a country that really couldn't feed itself because everybody or at least a big proportion of the population were huddled into the capital city. So that sort of led us up to 1975 and I think it was sometime in April 75 the Khmer Rouge actually took over the government. So the Lon Nol government disappeared and then we had a period of three and a half, almost four years of what's known as the killing fields. So the Khmer Rouge came in with a very, I would call it unorthodox but also brutal approach to development and their view was we needed to bring the whole country back to year zero and the way to do that in order to rid the country of all the ills that they saw had affected Cambodia over the years, the first thing they did was actually remove everybody from Phnom Penh. So here we are, we have two million people essentially cluttered into the city. Within a few weeks of the arrival of the Khmer Rouge the population went down to 10,000. You imagine from two million to 10,000. And so where did they send? They basically redistributed them all over the country and not necessarily back to the places where they came from. Part of the ideology of the Khmer Rouge and it was a very interesting one as they recognized that Cambodia's rice was important. But they wanted to modernize it and their idea of modernization was to irrigate rice and to sort of base, somehow loosely base the concept on the old Angkor civilization, large grids of irrigation canals. And so that sort of, you can now sort of conjure up those images in the killing fields of very large numbers of essentially slave laborers out there digging ditches and trying to create irrigation canals. The idea was somehow, and they were, at that time they had Chinese advisors, the Chinese government had supported the Khmer Rouge and the idea they were even introducing rice varieties from China to plant in these areas. But with hindsight now looking at all that, the engineering was extremely faulty. Very little of that irrigation, that infrastructure ever led to any increase in irrigated rice production. And they abandoned, in fact the Khmer Rouge actually outlawed deep water rice. They didn't allow farmers to plant this traditional deep water rice they used to plant around the Tonle Sap Lake. And so over that period production went right down to less than a million tons, even half a million tons, I've seen some of the statistics during that period, which was way less than you needed to feed a population, notwithstanding the fact that the Khmer Rouge actually killed upwards of two million people over that period, one of the greatest genocides in human history. So this went on for three and a half, four years. Finally in January 79, the Vietnamese came into Cambodia and installed a new government. They removed the Khmer Rouge, partly because the Cambodian government, the Khmer Rouge government was launching attacks on Vietnam and Vietnam of course was a much more powerful force. And at that time also, I think China had also reduced and eventually not supported the Khmer Rouge because Vietnam had had its battles with China on the northern front as well. Anyway, so Vietnam comes back in, installs a new government led by Hoon Sen, who is still the leader to this very day. That was 79. And slowly NGOs sort of trickled into the country, no UN, because for many years that government was considered illegitimate because it had been installed by an occupation force, the Vietnamese had come in and removed the Khmer Rouge. So all along, even the time when Erie ultimately started working in Cambodia, the Khmer Rouge actually occupied the seat in the UN. And so there was no UN presence. In fact, all through this period, in the early days that we worked there, the only governments that recognized the Hoon Sen government at that time were the Soviet Union and the Soviet bloc countries, including Cuba. And one other country, one that was not in that sphere of influence and that was India. Okay, so you had all of the Soviet bloc, but no Western governments recognized the government in Cambodia, Australia did not as well. So anyway, actually several years passed. And then when we were invited in finally, Dr. Swaminathan received the invitation, we went into the country. At that point, this is early 1986, production had crept back up to about 2 million tons. Yields were still very low, but just land area expansion as some of the problems had been sort of solved in terms of security. It wasn't completely secure and there's still land mines everywhere, which seriously affected agriculture and particularly rice farming. People as well as animals were being blown up by stepping on land mines. But anyway, there was a bit of an increase in production. So the Erie program came in and we looked around and we were shocked, I would say, in that first mission. We couldn't quite believe what we saw or we'd heard. Not a lot of information came out to the outside world during that Khmer Rouge period. But we started to talk to people. We started to talk to the government officials. We started to talk to everyday folks. This was a hard line communist government, by the way, that we were dealing with back then. Anyway, but they did realize we have to feed our people, right? We have to increase production. They had that idea. So we said, OK, let's take a look at who we can work with. We typically work with a national research organization. They became our partners. You look around Cambodia, all the buildings were destroyed. Everything had been destroyed. We've got some great photos from that era of what were formerly research institutions in the 70s. Totally flattened. So where are the people? There were 400 trained agriculturalists in the country prior to the war. After the war there were 40. So you had a literal decimation of the skilled agricultural expertise, people who had worked in extension or ministry of agriculture and in the university and so on. So there were very few people available to work with. In fact, one of the things we did before we went to Cambodia was, Erie used to have this book, I don't know if you still have this now, where you could, they had little photographs of all the Erie trainees going back for years, right? And so we looked at Cambodia to see who'd done a training course at Erie. Actually there'd only been six who, there were six faces and six names there, but we brought this with us and we started asking around everybody we saw, you know, of course the first thing we tried to do is, so who has a connection to Erie here that we could start to work with? And we could only, we didn't actually physically locate them but we only heard of two of those six still alive, right? So they've really been wiped out, the human resources, the physical infrastructure wiped out and the varieties were lost as well because with all that dislocation with the fact that everybody moved from the countryside and then they went through this horrendous period of, you know, work slave camps basically. And also being told you can't plant this deep water rice and people were so hungry they ate their rice seeds, right? So you basically lost so much of the genetic resources, the rice genetic resources which were essential in Cambodia because 85% of the fields were rainfed. And so Erie's impact up until that point had been very much focused in the irrigated and rainfed and favorable rainfed lowlands had very little impact on the sort of more harsher environments. So all these traditional varieties in Cambodia had evolved under these harsh conditions but appeared to have been lost. However we have a good news story and the good news story was that luckily, well probably more than luck, very strategically Erie had sent in some collectors, I don't personally know the names who actually did this but I believe it was 72 and 73 just towards the period where the production and the, you know, the turmoil began, there had been a collection of rice varieties, traditional rice varieties. And I believe over 750 varieties, probably more than that were actually collected and stored in the Erie Gene Bank. So we did our checks on, we called up the folks in the Gene Bank and we found out that yes indeed we've got all these varieties that were collected at that point about 13 or 14 years previously. They'd lived safely in the Gene Bank while this horrendous, you know, genocide, civil war was going on in Cambodia. So over a period of several years part of the Erie program in Cambodia was actually to reintroduce those varieties and we had one plant, we had a couple of plant breeders there, Ram Chowdhury, Edwin Havier and they worked on reintroduction of these traditional varieties and many of those varieties then farmers, you know, grabbed them, went with them, multiplied them. So we had a sort of a two-prong process or two-pronged approach. One was to get these traditional ones back into places where they best fitted. The other part was where we've got irrigated rice and we still had 15% of the country maybe a little more irrigated. Let's get state-of-the-art modern IR varieties in their IR 36 and so on like that had gone very well in other parts of Asia had still not found their way, at least not good quality seeds of those varieties had found their way into Cambodia. So I had these two things going at once. So we then saw a big, it wasn't big to start with, it was let's say a slow improvement in production that has continued, you know, to this very day. So the varietal improvement part of it was very important. I can't underestimate the importance of the human resources and as I'd mentioned, the human resources had been decimated. As a result of the war, people had either been killed or they'd fled as refugees and disappeared off the map as far as Cambodia was concerned. So a major initial focus of our work was on capacity building. So this wasn't easy because virtually nobody there spoke English. So one of the first things we did was actually bring a group of Cambodians to Erie and I believe it was sometime in 87 that we brought this group of 13 Cambodians from Cambodia to Erie. This was the largest group of Cambodians ever to leave the country. Remember, nobody actually, well, let's say ever to leave the country other than to the Soviet Union or other sort of parts of the world that were friendly with Cambodia at that time. So we bought 13 of them. We organized to bring them to Erie and we brought them for five months of training. We had a special rice production training course. Everything had to be translated into Khmer and what they did was in the mornings they did rice production and in the afternoons they did English training. So we had the training center of Erie have them out in the field planting rice, doing all the physical stuff while it wasn't raining and in the afternoon they came in and we had a woman, Jill Sullivan, we brought her in and she taught English, sort of English for beginners. And so this went on for five months and these people went back to Cambodia and we ended up being able to work with them. So parallel with sort of improvements and technical assistance and all the rest was building up this capacity. And over a period of about 12, 15 years or so about 6,000 Cambodians were trained by Erie at all levels. Many of them of course were trained in country. And at one point we had a team of about five or six Erie scientists working there. But many of them, we brought them back to Erie, we sent them to other, we sent them on tours, they got to see other parts of the world where we'd actually made good progress in rice production. And some of them then went on to get master's degrees and even PhDs. So we look at Cambodia today, we help set up the Cambodian Agricultural Research and Development Institute called CARDI. We did that very early in the piece. And then we worked very closely to build up national capacity from scratch, physical infrastructure as well as the human resources to go with it. And we with support from the Australian government, we were able to send quite a large number of students off for advanced education to do masters and PhDs, mostly in Australia. Some of them did it here in the Philippines as well. And to this day, if you go and look at the organizational chart of CARDI, and you look at it over the last several years, the people who were running the organization, the current director, for example, Makara has his PhD in Australia, he's one of our counterparts, one of the trainees, and many others in the organization leading breeding and soils and entomology and so on all came through this eerie partnership that was supported mainly by Australia over those period of a couple of decades. So that's the that's sort of the history in terms of what we did. I talk a lot about varieties, but we worked on agronomy, we worked on integrated pest management, post harvest technology, mechanization, all of these things were going on at the same time over, you know, rather a long period. And, you know, I look at it when when we went in in January 86, the production in the country was around two million tons. The average yield was just over one tonne per hectare. And I look at it today. What is it almost 30 years later, right? Total production in the country is is around nine million tons. All right. The country is an exporter again. In fact, for the last several years, the country has been exporting somewhere around 800,000 to a little over a million tons per year. They've really developed their export export of rice as a source of income. The, you know, the area has gone back to above the level it was even before the war, from about two and a half million hectares, having gone down to half a million, now back up to three million hectares. So it hasn't greatly expanded. Much of the improvement has come through yield increases. So the yield is now around three three tons per hectare, which is, you know, it doesn't it's not that good, perhaps compared to Vietnam or Indonesia. But you've got to remember that still that country is largely rainfed. Irrigation has expanded investments have expanded. But to be able to get three tons per hectare of land that is principally rainfed means that, you know, a lot has gone into the improvement of crop production. So I think it's a great, you know, Cambodia itself is a great credit to Erie. And I think initially the vision of our director general, Dr. Swaminathan, and consistent long term partnership with with that country through thick and thin challenges of funding. For the most part, Australia was the was the big supporter, but we were able over the years to diversify that level of support. And one of the key successes is we've been able to connect Cambodian scientists with scientists in other countries. We always wanted that we didn't we didn't want them to be dependent only on Erie with the Lao with the Vietnamese with the Indonesians with the Chinese again, and build those sort of collegial relationships, which would give, you know, give strength to the to the national research system. So that's that's basically the Cambodia story. I think that that is actually a really good lesson, which by the way, I've shared with a number of other colleagues in other parts of the world as far away as Africa, really, you know, that when we see countries coming out of conflict, we, we, you know, I think we can take some lessons from from what happened in Cambodia. I've tried to have sort of similar approaches being used in in East Timor in Timoleste. Again, a country coming out of conflict. It's not it's not a predominantly rice growing area. But but I think the general principle, when you come out of conflict, you've often got minimal infrastructure. You've got very limited human resources. And you often need to borrow technology and build up research capacity yourself. So we've looked at that in Timoleste. We've looked at that in Mozambique. I know Erie is now working in Mozambique. I think doing a very similar approach, improving varieties, building national capacity and strengthening national institutions. It's a good model. And I think it should be shared more widely. And it's probably going to be very relevant to Afghanistan and perhaps some other parts of the world in the years ahead, not just for rice, but for any crop, actually.