Battambang starch factory
In 2007 Lom Orng trained 3,000 families in Samphov Loun district, Battambang province, to grow cassava root.
With generous funding from the Kadoorie Charitable Foundation, and investment from Cambodian businesspeople, we then built a nearby factory to make starch from the cassava. The factory now produces 1,150 metric tonnes of starch per month.
After the Flood
[This editorial by Lom Orng's John Macgregor appeared in The Phnom Penh Post in March 2012]
Three months on, the floodwaters have gone. The story now unfolding in the Cambodian countryside is less melodramatic, and has two sides. On the one hand there are those whose lives were all but erased by the floods - such as the young mother I met this afternoon in Battambang’s Moung Russei district, whose house has gone, and who sleeps on the dirt under a sheet of plastic with two kids - one tubercular, the other with lung disease. (In some Moung Russei villages 50% of houses were washed away.)