Word: thailand
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...more than enough alternative sources of food; for example, the Australian government supports the U.S. on the hostages but has continued its exports of meat and wheat to Iran, which this year will total $140 million. Similarly, Iran is importing eggs from Turkey, poultry from Rumania and rice from Thailand. Tehran is making up for the cutoff of U.S. medicines by buying some 600 pharmaceutical items from Japan, ranging from aspirin to antibiotics. It is importing U.S.-manufactured oil-drilling equipment from Rumania and could obtain spare automobile parts from a General Motors Corp. assembly plant in any third country...
Last week firsthand testimony about Viet Nam's determination to extend its authority over every corner of Cambodia emerged from three of the 120 Vietnamese army deserters who have turned up among the thousands of civilian refugees still streaming across the border into neighboring Thailand. Interviewed by TIME Hong Kong Bureau Chief Marsh Clark at a Thai military prison near the border town of Aranyaprathet, the deserters provided details about the continued warfare between Hanoi's army and the remnants of Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge forces, and about what is fast becoming the complete "Vietnamization...
...conditioned rooms in guesthouses," he said. "Refrigerators seemed to be working everywhere. Sometimes I even found a bottle of iced Vietnamese or Thai beer. But there was running water only in Phnom-Penh." Labbe observed a flourishing capitalist-style free market in food and in goods smuggled from Thailand. Cambodians who buried gold and jewelry during the Pol Pot regime have now disinterred their valuables in order to pay for the rice, clothing and household goods sold in the markets...
Because Labbe did not visit the war-torn regions of Cambodia, he saw no actual starvation during his tour, though he says that people are eating "very bad-ly." The Cambodians working for the new regime are being paid in rice and corn. Still, Cambodian refugees in Thailand report that there are hundreds of thousands of people gathered on the outskirts of every Cambodian city because the Vietnamese have forbidden them to return home for fear of encouraging un rest. These families are threatened with starvation, as are the 600,000 refugees along the Thai border...
Instead, some nations are returning to preindustrial methods. Over the past few months, the price of tractors in rural Thailand has fallen 20% as fuel has become scarce and expensive. Prices of water buffaloes, which do not consume diesel fuel but do produce free fertilizer, have soared. Some Thai officials are rather relieved that their bureaucratic bungling has stalled the pace of industrialization. Says one official: "If we had been more successful, Thailand would be in much bigger trouble today...