Two farmers plant out a rice crop by hand in a paddy field on a farm at the Preah Leap ...

Two farmers plant out a rice crop by hand in a paddy field on a farm at the Preah Leap Agricultural College, north of Phnom Penh. Cambodian farming methods remain as they have been for hundreds of years, traditionally linked to the annual cycles of flooding and dry season. The Khmer Rouge regime of the mid 1970s attempted to turn Cambodia's entire population over to agriculture, establishing paddy fields from virgin jungle and banning traditional forms of rice growing, which not only led to mass starvation, but to the loss of important rice seed stocks, levee banks and centuries of expertise. Combined with indiscriminate seeding of anti personnel mines which tie an estimated 800,000 hectares of productive land, the losses are still being felt today.