Global slowdown hurts Vietnam's poorest

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HO CHI MINH CITY, March 8 (AFP): Selling corn on a pavement in Vietnam's Ho Chi Minh City may be a world away from Wall Street or London's Square Mile, but Le Thi Hoa says she too has been hit by the economic slowdown.

From taxi drivers and street sellers to office workers and market speculators, people here uniformly agree that the world's financial problems have washed onto Vietnam's shores, and the poor are suffering.

Hoa said last year she was earning more than 100,000 dong (six dollars) a day, but she now pulls in less than 80,000.

Although communist Vietnam has changed rapidly in the last decade, it remains poor and mainly agrarian, with experts warning the slowdown threatens to stunt development and plunge millions of Vietnamese back into poverty.