ABSTRACT
Land inheritance has traditionally been a key social protection mechanism in the rural world. Young people gain a start in agriculture through inheritance, while older people secure care and assistance with farming tasks by providing land to children who look after them. In Cambodia, where the expansion of agribusiness concessions has driven widespread deforestation over the past decade, land has become a scarce commodity. In this chapter, we argue that rapid agricultural commercialization has created a gendered crisis of care, as growing land scarcity undermines informal mechanisms of social security in a context where there is limited state support. Based on a large sample of qualitative interviews carried out between 2016 and 2020 with indigenous and Khmer communities in Cambodia’s northeastern Ratanakiri province, we find a diversity of moral economies of inheritance as land-poor families seek to ensure their economic and social security. These changes include a shift from matrilineal to bilateral inheritance, young people delaying or foregoing marriage due to a lack of land, and parents allowing children to farm the land but retaining ownership. In the absence of universal, state-provided social protection, the commercialization of agricultural production relations results in the ‘depletion’ of many women who have to shoulder the burdens of unpaid reproductive and farm work alongside poorly remunerated and precarious wage work without any guarantee that they will be able to access inherited farming land.
