Address Samdech Akka Moha Sena Padei Techo Hun Sen
at the Closing of the 2011 Stocktaking and 2012 Direction Setting Conference of the Ministry of Rural Development
Chaktomuk Conference Hall, February 21st, 2012
Excellencies, Ladies and Gentlemen, National and International Guests!
Dear All Participants!
Dear All Participants!
Today, I am pleased to attend the Closing of the 2011 Stocktaking and 2012 Direction-Setting Conference of
the Ministry of Rural Development, which is being organized for us to
collectively review the achievement made in the past year, and to find
key strategies and mechanisms to ensure that the implementations of each
rural development project achieve fruitful results that would be in
line with the new direction of 2012. Taking this opportunity, on behalf
of the Royal Government of Cambodia and myself, I would like to express
my admiration and high evaluation for the collective efforts of
Excellencies, Ladies and gentlemen who are in the management and are
government officials of the Ministry of Rural Development in resolutely
and tirelessly fulfilling their roles and duties in the cause of
rehabilitating and developing the rural of Cambodia until accomplishing
many remarkable achievements for our nation and people.
Truly,
this conference provides a timely opportunity for reviewing and
reflecting on the progress of the tasks implemented in the past, and so
that we can learn from each other, discuss together, exchange
experiences, identify strengths and weaknesses and lay down new measures
and targets for the upcoming years. In this spirit, I would like to
offer my support and encouragement for your efforts in successfully
performing your duties and accomplishing many new achievements with the
aim to fulfill the needs of the people and contribute to the
acceleration of economic growth, social development and poverty
reduction. Along with this, our conference today is taking place at a
time when the Royal Government is increasing its attention and taking
action with strong and calculated aspiration in the development on all
sectors, including the acceleration in the work on rural development and
poverty reduction, in particular after our people just overcame the
flooding disaster in 2011.
In
this spirit, on behalf of the Royal Government of Cambodia and myself, I
would like to express my admiration for the management and government
officials of the Ministry of Rural Development, and rural development
offices in the capital and provinces, the Cambodian Red Cross, other
relevant institutions, local authorities at all levels, development
partners, non-governmental organizations, as well as for people from all
walks of life for the good cooperation and utmost efforts in sharing
the burden of the Royal Government in distributing emergency relief aid
and other assistance to the affected families and communities in the
Kingdom of Cambodia during the flood-responding phase in 2011. All these
contributions have indeed supported the acceleration of the momentum in
rehabilitating economic growth and enhancing daily living standard of
our people.
As H.E Chea Sophara has
raised in the report, within the past year we made many proud
achievements in rural development including all types of socio-economic
infrastructure development, human resource development, development
policy preparation, necessary regulation and standard documents
establishments along with the facilitating mechanisms preparation and
all development action plan implementations under the framework of rural
development across the country.
Truly,
all these achievements are reflected in the growth in living standard
of our people in rural areas that is improving steadily. Indeed, the
development of rural infrastructure such as clean water supply and rural
sanitation systems, education and training system, medical
consultations and treatments, healthcare, village’s doctors, commune’s
health centers, referral hospitals, moving schools, primary, secondary
and tertiary educations, as well as vocational training centers closer
to residential areas, are improvements in the human resources
capability, community development, and rural economy; and the
development programs along the Western and Northern borders of the
Kingdom of Cambodia are all great contributions for improving and
promoting in the welfare and living standard of the people.
In
addition, rural development has greatly contributed to the prevention
of rural-city and rural-urban migrations. In this spirit, I would like
to recommend ministries, institutions, concerned local authorities, and
all relevant agencies, in particular sub-national administrations, to
continue paying great attention and tirelessly taking part in rural
development in order to make rural areas in the country to use up
potential benefits of the available opportunities and be able to exploit
the advantages that are preferential for the development under the
national, regional and global frameworks, as well as to vigorously speed
up rural area development with the aim to double the living standard of
the people so that we can accelerate the reduction in the gap between
city and rural areas.
Indeed,
Cambodia rural area has transformed gradually from quiet place to
center of agricultural production, tourism, commerce, light
manufacturing, with electricity, interconnected roads and bridges,
schools from primary level and above, hospitals, health centers,
irrigation system, clean water supply system, wells, ponds and
reservoirs and so on. These reflect the fact that we have been helping
to enhance gradually the livelihood of rural people. Moreover, we have
not only turn rural areas into place of peace, safety, security and new
development, but also into new potential development pole for speeding
up our national economic development. In this sense, the government has
always consider that rural development is one of key priorities like
other sectors such as agriculture, education and health that we must
keep giving special attention to.
At
the same time, rural development is multi-sectoral tasks which require
active participation and cooperation from all stakeholders. In this
spirit, the government has been giving high and urgent attention to (1)
the rehabilitation and restoration of rural infrastructure including
rural roads, bridges, schools, health centers, rural health, (2) the
provision of clean water network and rural sanitation to answer demand
from all walks of life, especially people in rural area who have limited
access to clean water, (3) the construction and building of irrigation
system and sprinkling system for agricultural farming, particularly rice
production to increase productivity of the farmer, (4) the promotion of
service of consultation, care and treatment for people in rural
community, raising awareness on change in behavior and mindset related
of living and eating and preserving food and, (5) human resource
development, making law, regulation, policies and measures aiming at
promoting rural development of transparency, accountability and
efficiency in conformity to the Royal government platform and the Rectangular Strategy.
Obviously,
we are aware that Cambodia bear potential from natural resource and
agriculture that are situated across Cambodia, and majority of the
people living in rural areas. In this regard, we could clearly see that
our primary capitals for rural development are these natural resource
and agricultural skill that requires us to strengthen our capacity to
efficiently manage and make the best use of that capital. Moreover, we
must seek and bolster other production factors to complement the
potential of existing natural resource and labor force; such as
financial resource, leadership skill and entrepreneurship, because
developing agriculture sector alone is not enough for rapid development.
In this sense, we must keep implementing various activities and
continue close cooperation with one another to make us of all economic
resources such as natural resource, labor force, capital and entrepreneurship
to fruitfully develop rural areas further. Nevertheless, I am of the
view that among the 4 above-mentioned resources human resource is very
fundamental for every kind of development. Therefore, human resource
development at rural area is urgent and important task for rural
development, and as result rural development will reinforce human
resource development. I would say, in other words, human development is for rural development and rural development is for human.
Through
rigorous discussion of this conference, I believe that we had assessed
and laid out plans of action, measures and new direction to make further
achievements related to rural rehabilitation and development in the
coming years. In parallel, in addition to what we have been implementing
and citing in the conference and with objective to promote this sector
for Cambodian economic growth, I would like to provide a number of
recommendations as follows:
First.
The Ministry of Rural Development and relevant ministries-institution,
all levels of authorities must make further effort to construct rural
roads and seek any financial assistance to improve rural roads by using
DBST. Because, so far our budget package for rural road maintenance is
regular and cyclical, but the quality of rural roads remain poor which
require huge maintenance costs. Regarding this point, I reaffirm that
the state must ensure the construction of roads, bridges and physical
infrastructure that support socio-economic development, that these tasks
not only serve livelihood of the people, but also are the foundation
for private sector expansion that in turns accelerate the growth of the
whole economy. In this sense, I reckon that a number of rural areas
possess high economic potential that need to be promoted and encouraged
for private sector participation in development of physical
infrastructure through Private Participation in Infrastructure (PPI) and
Public-Private Partnership (PPP) which is the mechanism for resource
mobilization, promoting investment, raising productivity and
accelerating development.
The
Ministry of Rural Development and related ministries/institutions,
local authorities should continue to attract and mobilize private sector
to actively participate in this program with high ownership and
responsibility.
Second,
Ministry of Rural Development must continue to promote the supply of
clean water and sanitation in accordance with the plan determined by the
cooperation between relevant ministries- institutions, in line with the
national policies on the rural water supply which states that “ Every person must have access to clean water service and sanitation, and lives in an environment with hygiene by 2025” and the Millennium Development Goals of Cambodia that has determined that by 2015 “50%
of citizens living in rural areas will have access to clean water and
30% of citizens living in rural areas will have good sanitation”. In
this regard, I recommend the Ministry of Rural Development to actively
implement the counterpart program between state and its citizen to speed
up the progress of this sector.
Third, The
Ministry of Rural Development must pay higher attention to
administrative reforms and capacity building, including strengthening
leadership, managing the development capacity of lower level
institutions, training government officials and people in rural areas by
establishing training centers or rural development institutions at the
national and sub-national level.
Fourth, The
Ministry of Rural Development must rebuild cannel, repair village road,
excavate pond, provide crop seed and animal’s breeding stock and fruit
trees and grain crops and continue to cooperate with development
partners and NGOs to provide rural credit to other provinces besides
targeted provinces where implementations are underway. Within this, the
Ministry of Rural Development should find ways to incorporate small
production with big investment project, which can make certain programs
being automatically linked with one another and to reduce burden on the
state.
Fifth,The
Ministry of Rural Development and inter-ministerial committee must make
more concert effort to successfully develop western and northern border
regions of Cambodia by collaborating with ministries-agencies
concerned, private sector, civil societies and the donors in building
physical infrastructure and clean water network and rural sanitary,
electricity, developing the agriculture, tourism, health, education
sectors and generating employment for the people. These practices can be
good example of rural economic development for the rest of the region,
by transforming a rural area into a town and a pole of production.
Sixth, the
Ministry of Rural Development should formulate and successfully carry
out rural development strategic plan, policy paper on rural roads,
guideline on sanitary improvement for rural community, national strategy
on rural clean water provision and sanitary, rule on the establishment
and function of village development committee, as well as principle on
water usage from the Mekong and Tonle Sap rivers for rural development
goal.
Seventh, The
Ministry of Rural Development and relevant ministries/institutions
should collaborate to promote public investment in rural development and
agriculture, research and extension service by paying attention to more
plating through upgrading skills and capacity of agricultural
enterprises and agriculture-based enterprises; and raise efficiency of
irrigation system that is managed and owned by farmers and expanding
microfinance service. In this regard, all these works should have
indicators and statistical data to monitor and evaluate progress and
development of new programs.
Once
again, I would like to appeal to all participants of the conference to
actively and flexibly participate in the implementation of the mentioned
plan and share your knowledge and experiences learned from this
stocktaking conference to improve your performance to further realize
new achievements in accordance with our rural development strategy. I
also would like to recommend the Ministry of Rural Development and all
related Ministries/Institutions to transform good recommendations,
comments and experiences gained from this conference to be the practical
action pan in order to ensure the success of rural development. In this
spirit, I strongly believe that Cambodia is optimistically moving
forward to more development and prosperity with broader base and is more
favorable, through maintaining peace, political stability, harmonized
society and sustainable development.
Last
but not least, I would like to congratulate and highly value the
concert efforts made by the Ministry of Rural Development, who have
successfully organized this conference. I also would like to highly
appreciate relevant Ministries/Institutions, inter-ministerial committee
and municipal/provincial, district/khan and commune/sangkat authorities
as well as all levels of competent authorities and our people, who have
worked more closely with each other to address issues of rural
development and poverty reduction. At the same time, I would like to
request development partners, non-government organizations, civil
societies, and private sectors to continue supporting and further
contributing to the Royal Government and the people of Cambodia to
achieve success with ownership in the process of national socio-economic
development.
Finally,
together with the Closing of the 2011 Stocktaking and 2012 Direction
Setting Conference of the Ministry of Rural Development, I would like to
wish Excellencies, Ladies and Gentlemen the four gems of Buddhist
blessing: Longevity, Nobility, Health and Strength.
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