Gaining and Maintaining Control: Vietnamese Migrants, Cambodian elites and Strategies of Land Control along the Cambodian Borderlands

While the large-scale transfer of land in Cambodia to foreign agribusiness interests has received much critical attention, another set of cross-border land deals has gone relatively unnoticed. In recent years, thousands of Vietnamese have crossed the border into Cambodia and acquired land for the cultivation of rice and farmed shrimp. Though these land deals are small in scale, they involve some of Cambodia's richest farmland and most bio-diverse coastal ecosystems, and thus their cumulative social and ecological impact may well rival that of the much larger and better-known Economic Land Concessions. In this study, we draw on ethnographic research, conducted in a rice-farming area of Takeo province and a shrimp-farming area in Kampot, to explore this phenomenon of small-scale land transfers, developing a comparative case study through which we examine processes of accumulation, exclusion, and incorporation as they play out along Cambodia's border with Vietnam. This paper has two objectives, the first of which is to broaden the discussion around cross-border land deals to encompass both large land concessions and the kind of smaller land transfers now taking place along the Vietnam-Cambodia border. These land transfers, we argue, are driven by dynamics of agrarian change both in the Mekong Delta region of Vietnam, from which most migrants originate, and in Cambodia itself. In the Mekong Delta, economic liberalization and global market integration have spurred the rapid development of a commercial agriculture sector from a smallholder base. Much like larger firms, Vietnamese farmers face competitive pressures that compel them to expand their operations, and many have looked to Cambodia as a source of cheap land and a new frontier for accumulation and commodity production. This accumulation, moreover, has been facilitated by the recent marketization of land tenure in Cambodia, smoothing the sale and rental of land to Vietnamese migrants. The second objective of the paper is to examine and contrast the dynamics of social and ecological change set in motion by Vietnamese land acquisitions in our two case study sites, looking primarily at inter-related processes of exclusion and incorporation. We argue first that exclusion has been experienced differently in the two sites, ranging from the dispossession of locals in Takeo, as migrants acquire more and more of the region’s rice-growing land, to the loss of access to commonpool resources that has accompanied the conversion of coastal mangroves to shrimp ponds by Vietnamese farmers in Kampot. We then turn our attention to the way in which the Cambodian borderlands have been incorporated into new networks of exchange and circulation through these land transfers. We find again that incorporation takes varied forms, as Vietnamese shrimp farmers, bound by the perishable nature of their crop, form an enclave economy enmeshed in existing cold chains that tie them to Vietnam-based processors and exporters, but as rice producers in Takeo both Vietnamese and Cambodian exercise more flexibility, exploiting their position on the border to access input and output chains in both countries.