CAMBODIA—When a developing country loses a quarter of its population to genocide as Cambodia did, it’s hard to make a comeback. But with the help of the international community, Cambodia is on track to doing just that.
The small Southeast Asian country has had to overcome decades of civil war ending in 1989 and the mass killings of the Khmer Rouge communist regime in the ‘70s and ’80s.
“In 2006, the aspirational goal was for Cambodia to halve poverty by 2015,”said Alassane Sow, the World Bank’s country manager for Cambodia. “Cambodia already reached that goal in 2011.” Since 2004, Cambodia has reduced the number of people below the poverty line who earn less than $2.30 per day, from 53.2 percent to 20.5 percent.
It would not have made it without the help of the international governments, private companies, and NGOs.
“Without the international community, the country wouldn’t be anywhere,” said John Paul Dau, VP of operations of Angkor Gold Corp., a Canadian mining company active in Cambodia. It still relies on foreign money, there is little capital and technology, and everything is imported, he said.
Because Cambodia only exports low value-added products such as raw agricultural produce, the country doesn’t generate enough revenue to pay for imports such as cement to build roads or Caterpillar Inc. trucks to transport the cement. Imagine trying to pay for a Caterpillar truck with raw cashew nuts. In addition, the country also doesn’t have access to international capital markets to borrow foreign currency.
