The FAO-led PEARL project is helping smallholder cashew farmers in Kampong Thom improve production, processing and business management, while linking agricultural cooperatives more closely with buyers and other value-chain actors, a senior project officer said. Daniel Mate, Senior Project Officer of the PEARL Project of FAO said: Let’s talk about the project PEARL in Kampong Thom. PEARL project is supporting or helping smallholder farmers and other value chain actors to improve their adaptation. Specifically in Kampong Thom, our value chain is cashew. We have challenges in terms of production, increasing productivity, but also in terms of value addition. So the focus has been in organizing farmers in agriculture cooperatives to be more organized and also to be linked it to buyers and also to improve their processing capacities. That is the reason one of our current interventions here is to support the construction of dry yards. Specifically for today, the objective is to become the farm organizations more professional. We are providing them with support, with laptops so that they can be able to record everything they are doing to be more organizing, improving their management, to improve the business planning, so that they can be able to communicate with everyone backward or forward in the value chain. So as you know, PEARL project is supporting four value chains and four provinces, here in Kampong Thom, Cashew, in Siem Reap, vegetables, in Preah Vihear , organic rice, and the mango in Oddar Meanchey . And right now we are in a process of purchasing and delivering several assets. We talk about eight, nine net houses for Siem Reap. We are finalizing construction, we started construction of 10 dry yards here in Kampong Thom. And we will be starting additional six. We will deliver soon 17 tractors and nine harvesters.