By Chris Hufstader, Oxfam America (See original post)
Khek Koeu must have been having trouble sleeping at night. Underneath her house were stacks of rice in 50-kilogram bags. She and her daughter grew about a third of it, and they bought the rest after the last harvest. They will sell it later, hopefully at a profit. All in all, it’s worth about $18,000—leaving enough money for Koeu to invest in building a metal fence around her house and yard, with a gate she can lock.
Despite her worry about thieves, having enough rice to lock up is a nice problem for Koeu, a 55-year-old widow in Cambodia’s Pursat province. She says she is now making more money, and growing more rice, since she learned to apply what’s known as the System of Rice Intensification (SRI) in 2010. In the past six years, she says, she has finished paying for college for all three of her children, and she bought them all motorbikes. “It’s hard to afford all this,” Koeu says. “In the years before we started SRI we had a lot of difficulties