Another BBC fit up

From Climate Scepticism

BY JIT

Thursday. There was I, cooking tea. There was the radio, playing Radio 4’s PM. So much so normal. Then, at about 25 mins into the programme, came a feature about life working in a Cambodian brick kiln. Not fun, you might imagine. You would be right.

The story is that Cambodian farmers got into debt thanks to increasing droughts, and were forced into some sort of indentured service for the brick kiln owners.

Partial transcript follows. My interjections are in italic.

LAURA BICKER: How hot is too hot? And what effect is our warming climate having on some of our most vulnerable workers? That was what we hoped to examine in Cambodia’s brick kilns.

…

It’s horribly hot in the brick kiln. UK researchers monitoring the workers’ body temperatures found that most were heat stressed and two had heat stroke.

LAURIE PARSONS (Royal Holloway): We are not all equal under the climate… the people who are most vulnerable socially, economically, will tend to be the people who are also most vulnerable to climate change. So we need to consider how climate change impacts people through the lens of labour and inequality. And recognise that labour, exploitation, is a major factor in the worst impacts of climate change.

The textile industry is big in Cambodia, and they burn off cuts in the kilns as cheap fuel. Various brands were implicated by the presence of garments with their labels on. An emotive contrast is made between a barefoot Cambodian girl and the Disney PJs that are about to go up in smoke that she will subsequently breathe.

BICKER: The majority of Cambodia’s brick workers were farmers. As Cambodia’s climate changes and droughts become more common [sic], they took on debt to try to keep their farms going. When that failed, they migrated to the city. But they earn so little, that the debt will never be paid.

What do we know about Cambodia? Apart from the obvious tragedies of its history, I mean. Well, we know that it is still a highly corrupt state, and that although it badges itself as a democracy, any party that threatens the ruling party ends up getting taken off the ballot somehow. According to Wiki, peasants are being driven off their land:

Forced land evictions by senior officials, security forces, and government-connected business leaders are commonplace in Cambodia. Land has been confiscated from hundreds of thousands of Cambodians over more than a decade for the purpose of self-enrichment and maintaining power of various groups of special interests. Credible non-governmental organisations estimate that “770,000 people have been adversely affected by land grabbing covering at least four million hectares (nearly 10 million acres) of land that have been confiscated”, says Paris-based International Federation for Human Rights (FIDH).https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambodia

I don’t know the facts of this, but I would be interested to hear about it on PM, instead of hearing climate change blamed. Has there ever been a country that developed and where peasant farmers did not migrate to the cities and end up working in squalid conditions?

And what about that assertion about increased droughts? Looking at KNMI’s climate explorer, I could not find precipitation data for any long stretch in Cambodia itself, so there was no way to tell. (Weather data frequently ended in 1970, for reasons that you may guess.) The nearest long data series I found was from over the border in Thailand:

No, me neither.

Conclusion

There is a story here. It’s a shame that the spectre of climate change has to be dragged in from offstage to enable the manipulation of the narrative.

Your author shouted rather less polite words at the radio, but it didn’t answer. It just kept on rabbiting away as if I wasn’t there.

You can listen to the relevant PM episode here. (From 25 min 30 secs ish.)

Featured image

From Pexels. I’ve no idea where this kiln is, and the workers may well have never stacked a brick in their lives. I’m not sure how to access the metadata.