Bangkok, March 1:

Paid sex may not be on the minds of the representatives from international donor organisations when they gather in Cambodia, this week, to discuss aid to that poverty-stricken country. But were these officials from the donor community to venture out from the comfort of their swanky hotel to gauge the state of the sex industry in Phnom Penh, they may come up against a fact that serves a women’s organisation as one of the many stark indicators of poverty.

“There are women offering sex at very low rates, 20 US cents,” says Rosanna Barbero, coordinator of ‘Womyn’s Agenda for Change’, a non-governmental organisation (NGO) in the Cambodian capital working to empower women, “The prices have gone down because there is an increase in prostitution.” In the late 1990s, sex workers in Phnom Penh were charging customers two US dollars, she revealed during a telephone interview. “I am alarmed at this, they are getting desperate to earn, because there is more and more competition.”

There are other features that also convey the battle against poverty. Increasingly, studies done to gauge the quality of life of the women being held up as one of Cambodia’s success stories — the garment factory workers — show that there is a wide gap between outside appearances and what they endure. The hike in the price of two essentials in the Cambodian diet — fi-sh, which went up by 18 per cent last year, and ri-ce, which rose by five per cent last year — has seen most of these women settling for less nutritious meals. Some of these garment workers had confessed to researchers that they have gone from eating fish every other day to once every two weeks.

“These women have little choice but to eat some plain rice and soup,” Chrek Sophea, a former garment factory worker from Phnom Penh, said, “If they come from the provinces then they have a bigger problem, because they have to pay rent for a room from their salary before sending mo-ney home.” A study done by the Cambodian health ministry revealed that in 2004 — before the hike in the price of the staples — 90 per cent of garment fa-ctory workers tested anaemic. The World Bank, however, sees garment factory women in a different light. This sector, which employs over 250,000 women and which accounts for over 80 per cent of the country’s export earnings, has been praised in a recent report as a key reason that helped lift many of Cambodia’s 13.3 million people out of poverty.

According to the International Labour Organisation (ILO), the value of exports from this South-east Asian country’s clo-thing industry has risen from $26 million in 1995 to $1.9 billion by 2004. The average minimum monthly wage for a factory employee is $45, an amount that could rise to between $50to $60 per month if one is prepared to work overtime, resulting in a 12 hour-a-day schedule. The other sector that the Bank singled out in its ‘Cambodia Pov-erty Assessment,’ which was released in mid-February, was the tourism sector. The spectacular ruins of the Angkor temples near Siem Reap, in the north-west of the country, have been the principle reason, drawing thousands of tourists.

Thanks to these two sectors, the number of Cambodians living in poverty has dropped from 47 per cent to 35 per cent over the past 10 years, the Bank’s officials noted with a sense of achievement.

This good news for the Bank was based on the amount it has established to gauge the poverty line $0.44 per day. “Things have improved,” Tim Co-nway, co-author of the report, said, “The garment industry offers a relative sign of the people who have benefited from the growth in that sector. For-ty-five dollars per month is not bad. rather a good salary in Cambodia.”

“We are very confident in our findings that there has been poverty reduction over the past dec-ade,” he added.

Mentioned in the report was the increase in the number of Cambodians who have radios, own televisions and have access to electricity. The poverty that has “fallen in the countryside,” according to the Bank, can be seen in the shift that has taken place in the material used in rural areas for roofing over houses.

Thatched material has dropped from 74 per cent to 29 per cent, giving way to a choice of iron or aluminium sheets.