Vaico Irrigation Development Project (VID)

Guangzhou Wanan Construction Supervision Co., Ltd. (GWCSC) is a private Chinese firm established in 1995. It is under the supervision of the China Association of Engineering Consultants (CAEC). GWCSC contracted Guangdong Foreign Construction Co., Ltd. (GDFC) to carry out the irrigation project’s construction. GDFC registered as a foreign company branch with Cambodia’s Ministry of Commerce Business Registration Department on July 14, 2017, and has worked on irrigation projects across the country, including in Battambang, Kampong Trabek, Kampot, Pursat, and Siem Reap provinces.

Project Feasibility, Transparency, and Social and Environmental Ramifications

The most significant issue with the project is its feasibility, as various reports point to the irrigation project’s ineffectiveness. Reporting in 2016 stated that the main canals of the project were bone dry. At the time, a village resident explained that the project only supplied water during the wet season and thus the double season cropping objective of the project was impossible. Additionally, in July 2018 at the peak of the wet season, the water level of the main canals was described as too low to be effective. Rather than supplying irrigation, the canals were mainly serving as drainage from adjacent fields. Other than a few farmers using tractor pumps to pump water from the canal to their fields via plastic piping, the fields surrounding the canals remained effectively rainfed.

Non-competitive procurement

According to the official report published in The Council for Development of Cambodia’s (CDC) Official Development Assistance (ODA) Database, the Vaico Irrigation Project did not follow the government’s procurement plan. However, as Cambodia has no specific laws for development assistance or aid projects, such does not violate any laws. Thus, we cannot determine whether the default (government) procurement process encourages local and civil participation. An existing national framework for development assistance or aid projects, Development Cooperation and Partnerships Strategy is largely guided by the Millennium and Sustainable Development Goals (MDGs and SDGs) and the Kingdom’s national overarching framework for social, economic, and political development, the Rectangular Strategy. One of its objectives is to include all development actors in policy dialogues and utilize global and regional mechanisms to increase the effectiveness of partnerships.

However, China was not alone in its disuse of the government’s procurement system. In fact, of the 8 other development partners reviewed beyond China, only the World Bank and ADB used Cambodia’s procurement system over 50 percent of the time. Although the use of the government’s procurement system is increasing, as of 2019, only 61 percent of development partners use the system. Moreover, it is unclear what the Royal Government of Cambodia’s procurement system entails, so it remains unknown whether it is effective even when used.

To capture different practices, quality and level of transparency, researchers are asked to answer six related questions for each data point. 1 point is assigned for each question to which the answer is “yes.” Each data point therefore has a total score between 0 and 6, where “0” means no information was publicly available at the time of research (not transparent) and “6” means full transparency.