Using primary data collected from three villages in Prey Veng and Pousat provinces,
this study describes how land has been transferred from parents to children in rural
Cambodia since the late 1980s. While equal division among all children is the most
favored practice—thus further farm fragmentation is anticipated in the near future—
parents with very small land endowment are unable to divide land equally among
all their children and some children are unable to receive land from their parents.
The expansion of migration opportunity has not caused fundamental changes in land
transfer practices, but the premarital migration experience of children is negatively
associated with land transfer, especially when children settle in the migration destination
or marry a person from another province whom they met at the migration
destination and move to their partner’s place of origin. The data indicate that,
taking advantage of labor migration experience, children of land-poor parents choose
to leave their home province and make a living without land. However, landless
children are in a disadvantaged economic situation because they are also less likely
to receive non-land assets from their parents and farmland from their spouse’s
parents.