Paper short abstract:

Where previous structural adjustment programs once assumed that with the right market structures in place development would occur, current pro-poor development discourses emphasise the need to actively assist people take advantage of newly emerging trade opportunities. This paper will examine one example of this, the establishment of private rice seed companies in Cambodia.

Paper long abstract:

It is often asserted that aid exists to incorporate peasants into commodity relations. But perhaps the reverse is also true, namely that peasants exist to incorporate aid into gift relations. The first sentence bestows on development activities a type of hegemony and coherence that belies the general befuddlement surrounding development aid implementation, especially in the area of private sector development. This paper will illustrate that far from rationalising subsistence communities, their production and trade, towards the single end of commodity relations, private sector oriented development projects often reinforce and/or transform a range of different gift and commodity relations within the recipient country, strengthen some above others and often with perverse outcomes. Using the case study of private rice seed companies set up by AusAID in Cambodia, this paper will demonstrate how the dual aims of commercially successful rice companies and poverty alleviation resulted in both direct sales and indirect gifts of seed to farmers, both of which undermined the commercial viability of the seed companies yet ultimately bypassed the subsistence farmers the project set out to help. This outcome then precipitated the need for more donor aid to the private companies in the name of poverty alleviation of subsistence farmers.