But since the ultra-Maoist’s disastrous drive from 1975 to 1979 to turn the country into an agrarian utopia bereft of markets, money and technology, Cambodia has quietly picked itself up and is poised to become one of the major rice exporters in the region, experts said.

From the dismal postwar years, Cambodia has steadily rebuilt its irrigation systems, developed its technology and slowly but surely reclaimed thousands of hectares of rice fields from land mines.

‘Cambodia will become a major rice exporter,’ Agriculture Minister Chan Sarun said. ‘We achieved food security in 1995, and last year, as well as self-sufficiency, we had 2 million tons left over for exports.

‘We currently have 2.5 million hectares under rice cultivation, but we expect to increase that to 3 million.

Cambodia’s rice producers and millers are optimistic about their future, and this year, Cambodia even sold subsidized rice to African countries, including Guinea, as a humanitarian gesture.

So confident is Cambodia of being able to hold its own with the big regional rice players in the future that Prime Minister Hun Sen has been a key proponent of a proposed regional rice cartel similar to that of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries.

Thailand’s brainchild, the proposed Organization of Rice Exporting Countries, was aimed at protecting the region’s major rice producers but has deeply concerned major importers, such as the Philippines, which said it would only benefit major producers.

Phou Puy, president of the Cambodian National Rice Millers Association, said new growing techniques, rice strains and irrigation projects could potentially double the country’s rice crop by 2015.

‘With these changes, Cambodia’s traditional one-time-per-year harvest can increase to two, even three times a year,’ Phou Puy said. ‘By 2015, that could provide exports of 10 million tons.

‘Currently, we stand at between 2 [million] to 5 million tons, depending on weather conditions,’ he said.

The 2015 projection would have Cambodia matching neighbouring Thailand’s export predictions for 2008. Thailand is currently the world’s largest rice exporter.

Cambodia is increasingly also becoming a player in biofuel production, but Phou Puy denied that that development would put to use land that could be planted for rice.

Vast industrial farms have sprung up on the north-western border with Thailand, producing corn and soybeans, and jatropha, which is endemic to Cambodia and a prime source of biodiesel, now takes up hundreds of hectares.

‘But these crops grow where rice doesn’t, so they do not impact on our rice yield,’ Phou Puy said. ‘I have no doubt Cambodia has the potential to match or surpass our rice-producing neighbours.

Such a development would be a major achievement not only for the country but also for donors who have poured billions of dollars into Cambodia’s agricultural sector.

While China has been a key donor for irrigation development, alongside others including the Asian Development Bank, Australia has led the way in Cambodia’s technological and scientific advances, funding research and development projects.

The Cambodian Agricultural Research and Development Institute has benefited from millions of dollars in Australian aid and in return has been integral in developing new strains of rice, more resistant to the whims of climate change and the ravages of insects.

The institute’s mission is to educate individual growers in a country where the bulk of people involved in agriculture work on mostly small family plots.

These sorts of measures have been so successful that Chan Sarun envisages a second lucrative niche market in organic rice, which demands a higher price but costs farmers less to produce because they don’t use expensive fertilizers and pesticides.

‘Organic rice is very popular,’ the minister said. ‘We aim to reduce chemical fertilizer use step by step. The world prefers natural food, so we are moving in that direction.

Mechanization will not come overnight, and experts agreed the days of Cambodia’s rice farmers plodding patiently behind a plough pulled by cows or buffalo were not numbered.

But they said simple techniques with the right cropping, strains and a guaranteed water supply might one day take Cambodia to the top of the region in producing one of the world’s most precious staples.