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| In Kampong Thom, the Cambodian cricket capital, children bag crickets for sale locally or export to other places in Asia where
it is a delicacy. Erika Kinetz |
Cambodian crickets: one man's plague, another's dinner
This year's bumper crop of insects is providing snacks and export income.
from the September 19, 2007 edition
Page 2 of 3
Each year, during the May-to-December rainy season, crickets migrate here by the ton. Locals have eaten crickets for as long as they can remember, which for Nuch Mondy – a local government agriculture official – is the 1950s. But, he says, the cricket business didn't boom until a few years ago, when fancy new technologies – namely, the battery- or generator-powered fluorescent tube lights one now sees strung above white tarpaulin traps in the rice fields around Kampong Thom – enabled people to catch commercial quantities of crickets.
In peak season, the local haul is often 3 tons a night, which is packed in plastic bags on ice and sent to markets in Phnom Penh and Thailand.
"Crickets are useful insects," Mr. Nuch says. "People make money from them."
Indeed, for Ang Thy, a rice farmer, crickets are a bit like the lottery: a chance for sudden bounty. On a good night, he says he makes $15, not bad in a nation where the minimum wage is $50 a month. He spends his nights on the edge of a shimmering rice paddy just outside town, sitting on the hard mud with an ax and his dog. "It's very lonely at night," he says, but if he doesn't stand guard, he explains, "People will take my crickets."
Mr. Ang doesn't profess to know why crickets congregate here, or much about their breeding cycle. He just knows that when he turns on his lights, crickets come, and this time of year, they're big enough to eat.
He's strung up three tarpaulin traps, each under a battery-powered fluorescent tube light, on the edge of a friend's rice field. A tarp behind each light acts as a backboard that the crickets, drawn to the light, bounce against before falling into the tarp below, where they're trapped. At dawn, Ang Thy carefully transfers the crickets – most of which have suffocated by then – into plastic buckets that he carries to market.
Ang loves to eat crickets – especially stuffed with peanuts and fried with a lot of garlic. "It's a very good smell," he says.
In the near distance, the lights of other men's traps cut through the darkness, but Ang Thy insists there's no competition out on the fields. "It's up to the crickets which trap they want to go to," he says. Nature, he figures, will give him what he needs, no need to go out and grab it.
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