Cambodia, then, like so many other nations in the developing world, is an agricultural country, and, regarding the cash incomes of its people, desperately poor. In the past, Cambodia was able to earn foreign exchange to pay for imported goods by selling agricultural surpluses-of rice and corn, for example-or plant crops, such as pepper, rubber, and cotton. Its normal patterns of trade were broken up in the wars of the 1970s. When the fighting died down, Cambodian trade became lively again, but more informal, which benefited many individual traders but deprived the government of money it needed to pay for essential services, like electricity, schools, water, and highways. There was some question at the end of the 1980s if Cambodia would ever be able to trade its way back into the kind of prosperity that it had enjoyed in earlier times.
             Of course, the word "prosperity" is a relative one. Even in the peaceful 1960s, Cambodia was one of the poorest countries in eastern Asia, at least regarding individual income. It is hard for even a relatively poor Westerner to imagine just how poor-in terms of cash, choices about the future, and possessions-a Cambodian farmer or unskilled laborer has always been, or what an annual income of less than the equivalent of two hundred dollars means in terms of the everyday life of farmers and their families. In nearly all Cambodian families, everyone works hard to grow the food and earn money needed to survive. Even so, by international standards, most Cambodians are very poor.
             Being poor in Cambodia means eating less than a pound of meat a month, and a family's earning less than six hundred dollars from a rice crop that has occupied most of its labor, intensively, for the equivalent of three months. For most Cambodians, there is a little question of new clothes, gadgets, or vacations. The money from the rice crop has to last the farming family for an entire year unless the husband leaves hom...