Price Of Rat Meat Quadruples In Cambodia

August 31, 2008
By Robert Paul Reyes
Op-Ed Contributor
News Blaze (California, USA)

"The price of rat meat has quadrupled in Cambodia this year as inflation has put other meat beyond the reach of poor people, officials said on Wednesday." [ Reuters ]

It will be illuminating to deconstruct this excerpt from the Reuters article.

The two words "other meat" jump out at me. It's chilling how the Reuters writer casually compares a rat carcass to other meat like chicken or beef. Is this a harbinger of things to come in our own country; will we one day ask the butcher if the rat meat is fresh?

It's not a few homeless Cambodians who survive by eating rats, rat meat is so common that people anxiously keep track of its price.

Cambodians are so desperate that they are willing to pay through the nose for rat meat. Cambodians don't complain that they have to resort to eating rat meat, they complain because it's so expensive.

In America you are poor if you can't afford to buy a nice cut of New York Steak on a weekly basis; in Cambodia you are poor if you can only afford to buy rat meat.

At the risk of sounding politically-incorrect, let me declare that I will never dine at a Cambodian restaurant.

Robert Paul Reyes is a NewsBlaze writer on Politics, Pop Culture and Pointless Pontificating. Contact him by writing to NewsBlaze.

Rat meat: Staple food for poor Cambodians ... living under the prosperous Hun Sen regime

San Smey eats a piece of roasted rat in the provincial town of Battambang, Cambodia, February 19, 2004. (Chor Sokunthea/Reuters)
Cambodian shoppers search through rodent meat at a market in the provincial town of Battambang, approximately 290 km (181 miles) northwest of the capital Phnom Penh in this file photo.The price of rat meat has quadrupled in Cambodia this year as inflation has put other meat beyond the reach of poor people, officials said on Wednesday. (Chor Sokunthea/Reuters)

Rat meat in demand in Cambodia as inflation bites

Wed 27 Aug 2008

PHNOM PENH (Reuters) - The price of rat meat has quadrupled in Cambodia this year as inflation has put other meat beyond the reach of poor people, officials said on Wednesday.

With consumer price inflation at 37 percent according to the latest central bank estimate, demand has pushed a kilogram of rat meat up to around 5,000 riel (69 pence) from 1,200 riel last year.

Spicy field rat dishes with garlic thrown in have become particularly popular at a time when beef costs 20,000 riel a kg.

Officials said rats were fleeing to higher ground from flooded areas of the lower Mekong Delta, making it easier for villagers to catch them.

"Many children are happy making some money from selling the animals to the markets, but they keep some for their family," Ly Marong, an agriculture official, said by telephone from the Koh Thom district on the border with Vietnam.

"Not only are our poor eating it, but there is also demand from Vietnamese living on the border with us."

He estimated that Cambodia supplied more than a tonne of live rats a day to Vietnam.

Rats are also eaten widely in Thailand, while a state government in eastern India this month encouraged its people to eat.

(Reporting by Ek Madra; Editing by Alan Raybould and Paul Tait)