Rice Plus: Widows and Economic Survival in Rural Cambodia (Electronic book text)

War produces a preponderance of widows, often young widows with small children in their care. Rural widows must feed their families and educate their children despite rural poverty and the lack of opportunities for women. The economics of widowhood is therefore a significant social problem in less developed countries. This book explores in depth the economic coping practices of rural widows in the aftermath of the Cambodian civil war. War decimated widows' family support networks, including the loss of children - their social security. Their predominant economic plan was then to combine rice cultivation with an assortment of microenterprises - a 'rice plus' strategy. This significant study therefore also explores widows' access to key economic resources such as land, credit, and education. It concludes that although Cambodia's gender arrangement offered many economic options to widows, it also devalued their labour in a cultural structure of inequality: gender, poverty, and war interacted to reduce widows' financial resources, accounting for their economic vulnerability.