The Mekong Times Daily, vol. 01, #112, Wednesday, July 16, 2008

Images of a country desolated by the Khmer Rouge, an entire population put to work in the rice fields and yet dying by the hundreds of thousands of starvations, still haunts Cambodia.

But since the ultra-Maoist's disastrous drive from 1975 to 1979 to turn the country into an agrarian utopia bereft of markets, money and technology, Cambodia has quietly picked itself up and is poised to become one of the major rice exporters in the region, experts said.