Cookies and grains: The digitalisation of Cambodia’s agricultural export boom 

Anyone who’s dropped their phone in the bath should know to submerge it in rice. For Cambodia’s economy, the fix works in reverse: their agricultural potential can be unlocked, and problems can be fixed, through technology.

In the past few years, Cambodia has made strides in its trade digitalisation efforts, particularly with its government programme, the Digital Economy Framework (2021–2035). Their initiatives, which include e-commerce targeted at expanding access to global markets for small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) and women-owned businesses, are nothing short of admirable. 

However, digitalisation comes with additional hurdles for trade of agricultural products. They require not just the digitisation of compliance processes and trade finance products such as letters of credit (LCs) and bills of lading (BLs), but also that of sanitary and phytosanitary (SPS) certificates.

But e-sanitary (for animals and animal products) and e-Phyto (for plants) certification systems aren’t simple to adopt. There is a cost to building the necessary infrastructure, policy levers and regulatory barriers to consider, and public health and animal health guidelines to follow. 

Thereby, although Cambodian digital trade is expanding, its agricultural exports risk falling behind. Yet, if executed effectively, digitising agricultural trade at scale can enable a boom in the country’s food exports.  

The Cambodian agricultural expansion

Cambodian agriculture contributes to around 20% of the country’s GDP and employs 33.4% of its workforce, making it a central pillar to the South-East Asian nation’s economy. Historically, the sector has been bountiful, generating over $5 billion in export revenue annually.

In 2025, Cambodia exported 14.9 million tonnes of agricultural products, marking a 27.8% year-on-year increase. This was largely driven by a boost in the nation’s paddy rice and milled rice exports, which grew by 48.8% and 45.6%, respectively. 

The Cambodian Rice Federation led this exponential growth, setting ambitious export targets that positioned Cambodia as a global leader in rice production.

Other products showed a steady increase, with cassava, cashew nuts, maize, mangoes, fresh bananas, pepper, mung bean, and soybean being among the agricultural goods that followed the rice trend. 

Cambodia’s Ministry of Economy and Finance should be credited for this agricultural expansion. It has granted multiple financing packages – worth around $440 million by mid-2025 – to the Agricultural and Rural Development Bank (ARDB). ARDB’s offerings include loans to SMEs in agriculture, rice sector stakeholders, and farming cooperatives, which all play a role in this growth. 

The Cambodian government is also actively promoting a transition from subsistence farming – a small-scale agricultural practice – to large-scale commercial agriculture and higher-value processed goods. Its strategy involves diversification into nine key commodities: rice, cashews, rubber, cassava, mangoes, vegetables, aquaculture products, pepper, and sustainable wood. 

However, the limited application of SPS measures, consequential poor hygiene, and the failure to demonstrate the application of SPS standards, mean Cambodian products are also regularly excluded from global markets – a concern that could eventually stunt export growth. 

The international consensus on the sanitary considerations of agricultural trade, formalised by the World Trade Organization (WTO) Agreement on the Application of Sanitary and Phytosanitary Measures, deems that SPS compliance is necessary across international trade. While Cambodia has made progress in SPS compliance since its accession to the WTO in 2004, assessment processes for SPS needs across Cambodia are fragmented, and food-borne and zoonotic diseases – such as the highly pathogenic avian influenza (HPAI) – remain a concern. 

China, a key export market for Cambodia, has rigid penalties when it comes to food safety. For the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) as a whole, with China as its top trading partner, health and safety rules operate as nearly half of the non-tariff barriers to trade. 

The Cambodian Ministry of Agriculture’s National SPS Database is an initiative that harnesses technology to track the safety of agricultural goods. This mitigates their risk of being rejected at a border, yet there is more need for digitalisation to be implemented as a means to tackle this issue.

Existing digital trade initiatives

According to the United Nations’ (UN) Global Survey on Digital and Sustainable Trade Facilitation, in the last decade, Cambodia’s trade facilitation performance improved significantly, with its score rising from 48.39% in 2015 to 78.49% in 2025. 

The key components of this score include transparency (80%), formalities (91.67%), and institutional cooperation (88.89%), but the score is pulled down by its paperless cross-border trade rate, which, in 2025, sat at 61.11%. This is slightly lower than that of the broader Asia Pacific (APAC) region, where the overall score was 65.66%. 

This is not to dismiss government efforts, which include platforms like CambodiaTrade that aim to integrate SMEs into cross-border e-commerce, with 176 registered suppliers already participating.

The Electronic Advance Data (EAD) for customs processing also improves efficiency by enabling pre-arrival data processing, risk assessment, and faster clearance. Yet, agricultural certification processes remain largely disconnected from these digital systems.

e-Phyto and e-sanitary developments

According to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), the electronic exchange of SPS certificates improves efficiency, transparency, traceability, and risk management across global food supply chains. They can lower operational costs while improving information transfer and reducing fraud in certification processes.

However, a lack of harmonisation and alignment prevents Cambodia’s full adoption of e-sanitary certificates, particularly for animal products, which bring additional regulatory hurdles.

While Cambodia has the Cambodia National Single Window (CNSW), designed to simplify trade, its module for phytosanitary measures fails to meet international standards – and goes unused.

Systems such as the ePhyto Hub offer centralised infrastructure that enables the exchange of e-Phytos between National Plant Protection Organizations (NPPOs) – official government agencies responsible for preventing the spread of plant pests.

Cambodia is working to connect to the ePhyto Hub, which would allow it to benefit from the system’s 24/7 availability, its single exchange protocol, and identity verification and authentication mechanisms. 

According to the UN Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific (UNESCAP), when an e-Phyto exchange happens point-to-point – between an importing and an exporting country – bilateral agreements need to be in place, generating additional costs. Moreover, non-compliant documents lead to more import rejections than actual plant-health issues do.

Cambodia has been an early adopter of the Generic e-Phyto National System (GeNS), established for countries that lack their own national systems but seek to be connected to the Hub. The GeNS offers export and import certificates while managing reference data, users, workflows, and information.

Cambodia’s successful connection to the ePhyto Hub would enable the electronic application and issuance of certificates, reducing sanitation-related barriers to its plant exports.

Remaining barriers

A central challenge to establishing e-certification systems, as identified by the OECD, is that it requires substantial investment in IT infrastructure, training, and system maintenance. For developing economies with limited resources, this is a significant hurdle.

Agricultural trade also involves multiple government authorities, and animal products are notoriously complicated to trace – especially for smallholder farmers – which creates additional difficulties for countries like Cambodia with large, fragmented rural communities. 

In the UK, when importing products of animal origin (POAO) from countries outside the European Union (EU), suppliers must be approved and the border inspection post (BIP) at the port must be pre-notified. 

The UK government warns that the goods will be checked at the border and can be subject to rejection, thereby recommending that each tier of the supply chain is expressed in writing and all paperwork is complete – processes that would be greatly eased through digitisation. 

The EU, on the other hand, has bilateral agreements with different countries and blocs like Canada and Central America regarding SPS protocols, creating divergent norms and standards. 

Once again, digitalisation can be crucial in establishing a harmonised system for SPS. However, for Cambodia and other developing markets, the investment push towards this must be international, with countries committing to establishing a unified digital framework that aids seamless agricultural trade. 

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The next steps for Cambodia include increased investment in digital infrastructure, targeted specifically at streamlining SPS protocols and certificates, in addition to upgrading systems like the CNSW and integrating fully with the e-Phyto Hub. 

Greater alignment with international standards is also vital, alongside a global push for harmonised standards. 

With its consistent economic expansion and emergence as a net rice exporter, Cambodia has the potential to harness digital trade systems to dominate its region as an agricultural exporter. This could achieve inclusive growth for Cambodia, benefitting its rural communities that account for 75% of its total population.