The purpose of the community seed festival is to preserve ancient seeds and their varieties, to continue the tradition of natural cultivation using indigenous varieties that promote health, well-being and a beautiful environment, and also to highlight our Khmer ancestors’ magnificent agricultural heritage.

In the fields of fisheries, agriculture, and animal husbandry, our wise ancestors conserved the natural ecology in a sustainable way and fostered development of the agriculture sector into the potential befitting a great national economy.

The agricultural work of our ancestors is clearly based on natural principles, in how we work with nature and the preservation of natural resources such as land, water, forests, fish, and wildlife, as recorded in history. For hundreds and thousands of years and generations, we’ve all been utilizing nature in this way. However, the traditional agricultural method is now unfortunately being abandoned.

Modernization affects Cambodian farmers virtually everywhere, leading to the dominance of contemporary farming practices that rely almost entirely on chemical inputs, fertilizers, and pesticides of all types. Practicing this approach makes us happy for a while since it produces a lot of yields, readily and promptly on time, but that happiness turns into despair after 10 or 20 years. Crop yields are plummeting at an alarming rate. Farmers are compelled to pay interest on loans, purchase seeds, fertilizers, and expensive treatments, as well as sell their products at cheap prices or risk losing money. Every month, the amount of debt owed increases. Some individuals sell their farmland/residential land in order to pay off their obligations. Not only that, the exposure to chemicals is causing deterioration in farmers’ health, as well as land degradation and biodiversity loss.