The organizers are also working with rural farmers to help them shift from slash-and-burn subsistence agriculture and charcoal production to more modern farming methods that could result in far bigger food crops and the use of cleaner fuel.
Most of the residents are subsistence rice farmers who cultivate irrigated paddies in valleys or who plant on hillsides that have been cleared and burned (slash and burn agriculture, known locally as tavy).
Khmer Loeu typically practice subsistence slash and burn shifting cultivation in small villages of between 20 and 60 nuclear families.
The province is subdivided into nine districts, as follows: Most of the indigenous residents of Ratanakiri are subsistence farmers, practicing slash and burn shifting cultivation.
Local subsistence strategies include slash and burn agriculture, fishing, hunting, and small-scale carbon production.
Subsistence hunting, fishing and slash and burn farming require extensive daily physical activity, consistent with high VO2max values found using a variation of the Harvard Step Test on a subsample.
Patients' subsistence strategies were mostly centered around slash and burn agriculture in combination with various other economic activities such as fishing, hunting, coal production, fish farming, logging, and gathering of certain palm leaves.
The policy devastated the livelihoods of many subsistence farmers, driving them deeper into the jungle – where, inevitably, their slash and burn farming techniques have caused even greater environmental damage.
We burn thousands of gallons of diesel fuel a year in our 10 tractors, undermining the very foundation of our subsistence every time we cultivate a field or put up a bale of hay.
