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.

Most of the work in the northwest would be done by more than one million April 17 people who had been evacuated from Phnom Penh and from the city of Battambang into rural areas in the zone. Over the next two years, these men and women were forced to hack rice fields, canals, dams, and villages out of malarial forests. Tens of thousands of them died from malnutrition, disease, executions, and overwork. These deaths, when they became known, distressed the authorities in Phnom Penh only to the extent that they indicated that “enemies” were at work behind the scenes. New people, because they were so numerous and “class enemies” of the revolution, were expendable. Many survivors recall a chilling aphorism directed mockingly at them by cadre: “Keeping [you] is no gain. Losing [you] is no loss.”10