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dubious services as ship repair at Hai Phong, in exchange for oil and development aid (and, although he did not say so, military assistance). I suggested to all my interlocutors that the only way forward was for Vietnam to participate more in the international division of labour (COMECON speak for trading with the West), by exploiting Vietnam's two undoubted advantages, natural resources and plentiful cheap labour. The Head of Europe II Department, MFA (Nguyen Dinh Phuong) agreed but added wistfully that it would take Vietnam a long time to reach the Soviet (sic) standard of living. All the Vietnamese emphasised that poor infrastructure was perhaps the most crippling barrier to Vietnam's development.
12.
One of the most revealing statistics about Vietnam's current plight was made both by Voronine and the UNICEF representative. In the course of a tedious recital of Vietnam's developmental problems in which he managed to blame French colonialism, protracted war, American defoliants, and a lack of non-COMECON aid, Voronine referred to a low average calorific intake, low iron content in the diet, etc. Steven Allen of UNICEF gave chapter and verse. He said that the normative UNICEF requirement was a daily intake of 2,300 calories. The Vietnamese average in 1985 was 1,900 calories. In the first part of 1988 it was down to 1,200 calories, admittedly before the latest rice.
In other words, the diet of the average Vietnamese fluctuates around the starvation level. This is precisely the kind of situation which would benefit from a food aid programme which would bridge the marginal difference between slow starvation and a stable diet. Allen also insisted that Western aid would go a long way in Vietnam. He urged HMG to consider at some stage a humanitarian gesture by for example providing matching funds to the UNICEF vitamin A programme to combat puerile blindness. At a cost of only US$ 45-50,000, we could help to eliminate blindness in a significant number of Vietnamese children. Such basic statistics reveal more about the state of the country, and perhaps illuminate the reasons for the continuing exodus of boat people, than many hours of Voronine's tendentious exculpation. Deputy Foreign Minister Nien had the grace to admit that before the war, Vietnam was a rice exporter: it was "unacceptable" that Vietnam should now be less than self-sufficient. He insisted: "the future is bright. But how to make a start?".
Cambodia
13.
The Vietnamese predictably insisted that Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan was not relevant to Cambodia and that the key decisions over Cambodia had now been taken with
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