AsiaLIFE

A small but significant group in the Cambodian food industry are saying no to pollutants. Clive Graham-Ranger speaks with some of the advocates for and supporters of organic farming. Photo by Conor Wall.

Villagers were fascinated to watch as a 2,000 cubic metre hole was excavated and a 40 metre deep well was dug in a patch of land owned by Les Jardins du Mekong in Pum Taskor, eight kilometres from Phnom Penh. What, they wondered, was going on? The answer: It was a necessary measure to dig past the poison, find healthy soil and fill the void with nutrient-rich soil.

Every day more than 140 million people in southern Asia drink groundwater contaminated with arsenic, according to a research programme carried out by Scott Fendorf, a soil scientist at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California.

His team discovered that the poison occurs naturally in waterborne sediments in the Himalayas. These are carried downstream, polluting the soil of countries bordering the Mekong: Tibet, Myanmar, China, Laos, Thailand, Cambodia and Vietnam.

Health professionals call it the biggest mass-poisoning in history.

At Les Jardins, creating a deep well was a labour of love and necessity ordered by Philippe Ammeux, an agricultural auditor from Dunkirk, Michel Remillon, a farmer from Strasbourg, and Leakhena Sophan, their Cambodian partner in the Les Jardins venture. They realised that Cambodia was facing a crisis, relying on imported vegetables from Thailand, China and Vietnam—and not very good quality greens at that.

Their mantra of organically grown self-sufficiency became a revolutionary slogan picked up not only by restaurants across the capital, from Topaz to the FCC, but also shops such as Natural Garden and Veggy’s.

Using a homemade compost mix of water grass, cow manure, rice straw and banana leaves, Les Jardins naturally enhanced and improved the soil—though some root crops just did not thrive in Cambodia’s predominantly wet and dry climate.

Ammeux admits they tried to grow almost every variety of vegetable, but the weather beat them back. Now they concentrate on lettuces such as romaine, rocket, green and red Bataviam, as well as herbs including basil, coriander and dill.

Grown from seed flown in from France, the crops were bedded down in a nursery for several weeks before being planted out. They were then tended lovingly for the 10-week maturing cycle before being harvested and delivered “farm fresh” to customers.

Arnaud Darc of the Thalias Group of restaurants, which includes Topaz, is a great believer in using organic products and wishes there were more farms that practiced l’agriculture raissoner (essentially people growing vegetables with their brains rather than chemicals).

Darc welcomes the ambition to move away from imported vegetables, which were sprayed with pesticides, fungicides and all sorts of other ’cides, a kind of chemical soup.

“Vegetables and herbs should taste as nature intended, not like they have come out of a laboratory,” he says. “That’s why at Topaz we try to complement our dishes with fresh, organically grown accompaniments.”

Luu Meng of Malis Restaurant, which is also part of Thalias, said the market for organics was still in its infancy. He adds that price and quantity were the determining factors. “There just aren’t enough organic growers and, on top of that, the market is controlled by wholesalers who need to see a handsome return on their investment, says Meng.

Meng hopes for a noticeable shift towards home-grown produce, with rural communities planting, harvesting and bringing to market a new breed of vegetable that costs them less to grow because they didn’t have to buy expensive fertilisers and pesticides, and sold for a premium price. Yet success can also be counterproductive, notes Meng.

“Take, for example, the story of Kampot pepper,” he says. “We worked very hard at breathing life into the market for it at US$4 a kilo. It is now so popular it sells at US$14 a kilo and the whole crop has sold out, so there is no more until the next harvest. We need to grow more to meet the increased demand.”

Although the government has praised the self-help aspect of organic farming, it has yet to put in place any legal controls to ensure the farmers’ claims on the packaging are borne out in truth.

Until such controls are in place, Ammeux says he regularly sends water samples to the Pasteur Institute in the capital and soil samples are then tested in France.

Through efforts to make an organic food industry flourish, Cambodia could again become a green and pleasant land.

“I obviously look forward to Cambodia not only growing organic fruit and vegetables [and] becoming self-sufficient as a result,” says Meng. “But it’s a little way off.”