Pol Pot wanted to set this process in motion immediately within the framework of a national plan. To allow economic activity to occur for even a year without control, he thought, would revive capitalism, which was unthinkable. In the preamble to the plan, Pol Pot brushed aside conceivable objections, including the benefits of moving more slowly, declaring that “we mean to build the country quickly, and build socialism quickly” Cambodia was not comparable to more cautious countries. “We have a different character from them,” he said. “We are faster than they are.”8

All the same, there were many obstacles to achieving independence-mastery. Cambodia had no exportable minerals, few skilled workers, even fewer technocrats, and an insignificant industrial sector. Exports were limited to agricultural products. Of these, the most important was rice, which had been the backbone of Cambodian exports since the 1920s. There was no way of escaping the past or the reality of resources: Rice exports became the key element in the Four Year Plan. Pol Pot placed an almost metaphysical value on rice, associating it intimately with the recently empowered rural poor. Even before the plan was promulgated, the party had launched the slogan “Three tons [of unhusked rice] per hectare,” which soon became a national goal. The slogan itself, without acknowledgment, echoed a campaign launched in China by Vice Premier Hua Guofeng toward the end of 1975. The target figure of 3 tons per hectare suggests that the Cambodian leaders had not worked out any agricultural slogans or policies of their own and that what was good enough for China would suffice for Cambodia as well.

This hastiness and lack of thinking are not surprising. Hardly any of the leaders of the party had ever planted, transplanted, or harvested rice to feed a family. Although they knew that the target of 3 tons per hectare could not be achieved through uncoordinated storming attacks, even within the framework of the plan it was unrealistically high. Before 1970, yields in Cambodia had averaged less than 1 ton of unhusked rice per hectare. Most of this was of mediocre quality, produced on family-owned plots without fertilizer or machinery. The party’s slogan demanded that Cambodia’s average yield be tripled at once, not in response to superior technology or material incentives but as testimony to a collectivized revolutionary will and the transferability of military zeal into the economic sphere. “Can we accomplish the Plan or not?” Pol Pot asked rhetorically. “The answer is that we can accomplish it everywhere; the evidence for this is our political movement” (emphasis added).9

The northwest—comprising the provinces of Battambang and Pursat—was where the agricultural sections of the plan were to have the most effect. In a draft of the plan, a party spokesman referred to this zone as a “number one battlefield” for economic growth. In that zone, land scheduled for two rice crops was to increase from 60,000 hectares in 1977 to 200,000 hectares in 1980, making up 40 percent of the national total of double-cropped land. Over 140,000 hectares of uncultivated or unproductive land were to be brought under cultivation. All in all, the northwest was scheduled to provide 60 percent of Cambodia’s rice exports between 1977 and 1980.