A rice god
named Harry

Emergency action

The recovery plan, still being fine-tuned as Nesbitt and Denning sat on the building given to them by the departing Vietnamese army, was for Nesbitt to begin an urgent rice-production program using Cambodian seed collected before the war and stored in the International Rice Research Institute’s (IRRI) germplasm bank in the Philippines.

Nesbitt also had to start training a local support team. Denning’s job was to direct the overall science from his existing IRRI base south of Manila. With no time to breed new rice varieties through genetic crossing, it was a case of identifying the best traditional varieties, planting them out, and selecting the highest-yielding plants from each crop.

This had to be done concurrently with other equally mammoth goals, as Nesbitt explained: “We basically had to build a whole new farming infrastructure, including a system of national agricultural research for the Cambodians to later take over.

'This meant training people up to PhD level. But the most urgent of all was to raise basic household food production.”

The ambitious program, eventually to be called the Cambodian-IRRI-Australia Project (CIAP) was boldly funded by AusAID in defiance of the US, which remained hostile to Cambodia and to the Australian Government’s intentions there. This opposition meant Nesbitt was on his own; no peacekeeping force to watch his back while he began the painstaking process of rebuilding a destroyed nation, from its bloody paddy fields up.

The effort needed large measures of practical science, humour and courage. When Nesbitt’s first plant-breeding trials were run on disputed land, the CIAP office was destroyed in a grenade attack, rifle shots were fired into Nesbitt’s house and a price was put on his head: “We would clean up and move on, trying not to think about another attack.”

One of his first locally trained agricultural technicians was killed when the CIAP Toyota HiLux was ambushed and machine-gunned by remnant Khmer Rouge. Even normal day-to-day living was a trial: “For the first four months I was constantly ill,” Nesbitt said . “The living conditions were grim, the few eating places that had opened were filthy. We worked long hours for six days and the seventh, Sunday, was ‘survival day’ spent scouring the city for food and basics like soap, detergent and toilet paper.”

Nesbitt never considered giving up. Even in 1997 during another attempted coup when most of the expatriate population fled, Nesbitt stayed, bolstering the morale of his Khmer staff, and demonstrating in the most practical way possible that he would not leave until the job was done. When that moment arrived near the end of 2001, this tenacious son of a Perth boilermaker/welder had emerged from the mud, the dust and the blood a Cambodian legend; the unheralded scientist behind one of the most remarkable social and economic recoveries in modern history.

Interviewed a decade later, farmers and their families tell stories that have a common thread: in a remarkably short period they moved from hunger to hope, to relative prosperity. Ouk Chor, a community leader at Tongke Village in Takeo province held off until 1998 before taking the plunge and asking the CIAP team for help. “We were all hungry, there was never enough rice. So we decided to try the new IRRI varieties, learn about fertilisers and how to make more efficient use of the soil with irrigation … and we doubled the harvest.

“Now we are growing two, sometimes three crops a year, the village is making money from the surplus and we are considering diversifying into melons and mung beans. Before, we could only think of how hungry we were. Now we are building businesses.”

To the east in the Svay Rieng province, a widow whose husband was murdered by Pol Pot forces celebrated a more modest result. The improved production from her small farm allowed her to pay for two daughters’ weddings, buy a second-hand battery-powered television set and, even more critically, earn enough money to pay medical bills.

When Nesbitt arrived in Cambodia in November 1988 (with his pregnant Canadian wife Betty), 65 per cent of the Cambodian population were women and almost half of these were under the age of 16. Rice production under the Khmer Rouge had plummeted by over 80 per cent. A country, which in the late 1960s had been one of South-East Asia’s leading rice exporters, was now a wasteland, scarred by thousands of kilometres of slave-built irrigation channels that were utterly useless.

The agricultural engineers who might have made them functional had been murdered in the purge of the professional classes. With the help of the Department of Agronomy in the new, somewhat fragile Cambodian Government, Nesbitt assembled a small team of local trainees and started trialling the most promising Cambodian rice varieties, as well as the high-yielding IRRI-developed IR66 variety, which allowed two crops a year.

While growing the new varieties to determine how to farm them under the varying Cambodian soil and climatic conditions, the CIAP team also had to start working with farmers to prepare them for new technologies, such as modern fertilisers and their application, irrigation, new harvest and post-harvest technologies, and integrated pest management – the non-chemical control of insects. The team was expanded to include a prominent Indian plant breeder, Ram Chaudhary, and an American social scientist, Richard Lando, who had to pretend he was Dutch. It was an unceasing race against time; keeping bellies full while engendering an agricultural revolution, which was greeted by the bulk of the population with anxiety.

New generation

Pictures: Chan Phaloeun in 2001 at the site of a destroyed research station; and meeting with farmers to discuss progress. Photos: Brad Collis

Not long after Nesbitt and Chaudhary started they were joined by two young local graduates from Russian universities, Chan Phaloeun and Men Sarom, who represented the start of the Cambodian Government’s long-term aspirations of having its own institute of agricultural research.

Survivors of the past, they were to be trained to set the future. Phaloeun, who was assigned to work with Nesbitt, had only just survived the Khmer Rouge labour camp where her father, a pharmacist, had committed suicide when he became too ill to work. After four years of punishing labour on a starvation diet of porridge made from boiled rice and water, the 17-year-old Phaloeun succumbed to malaria. Instead of hospitalisation, she was simply taken from the camp with 11 other dying teenagers to a village where they were abandoned. All died except Phaloeun, who through sheer will, hung on and was slowly, covertly, nurtured by the villagers.

“I remember the people deciding not to feed me because I would be dead in a few days. But I asked for some rice and fish. I said if I was going to die the food would make it easier. As soon as I started eating proper food I began to recover, but I was still close to dying for a long time. The food made my stomach bloat and my skin was fragile like paper and easily broke. I was so weak I couldn’t even count to 10. I would get to five and stop because it was too hard. It was six months before I could stand on my feet.”

Phaloeun was still gravely ill when the Khmer Rouge were driven out from Phnom Penh, where she was taken and nursed back to health by a doctor who survived the purges by disguising himself as a ‘cyclo’ (rickshaw) driver, which some professionals had managed to do. For years Phaloeun tried to find him again, but he had vanished as mysteriously as he had appeared.

Phaloeun’s near-death from starvation became a powerful experience in her life, changing a girl who had grown up in middle-class comfort into someone acutely sensitive to the suffering caused by hunger and poverty. Helping farmers improve food production became an unswervable quest. The chance to work with Nesbitt, a western agronomist, seemed at first like a dream: “In 1988 you were only allowed to study in Russian or Vietnamese. This was a chance to learn English and to learn how to do proper scientific research. I was so excited, especially when Harry and I started driving to the provinces to find farmers to work with us. We had the only car so it was always full of people. I was proud … to be a part of the project … to be learning and helping with such important work. We were starting the rebuilding of Cambodian agriculture and we had to put food into people’s stomachs while we rebuilt the knowledge.

“In the beginning farmers were only interested in filling their stomachs. We knew we had to meet this basic need before they could be encouraged to experiment. People’s priority when we started was to stay alive. And that was just one job. The other was to plan a long-term research program and set up training courses, for farmers and for agriculturists. For example, farmers didn’t know how to only select seed from the highest-yielding plants. Farmers were simply putting aside a certain amount of grain for seed when they harvested. We showed them how to choose seed plants at the early tillering stage by recognising the yield indicators from the panicle, the growing points on the plant. The panicle can tell you in advance how productive a plant it is.

“We also taught farmers how and when to apply fertiliser. Some fertilisers were chemical, like urea, but many farmers couldn’t afford this so we introduced green manure – nitrogen-fixing legumes that could be grown and dug into the soil with bullock manure.”