About half the land is tropical forest. In general, Cambodia has a tropical monsoon climate, with the wet southwest monsoon occurring between November and April and the dry northeast monsoon the remainder of the year. Religious freedom is constitutionally guaranteed. Khmer is the official language, but French is widely used. 3 Economy Cambodia is one of the world's poorest nations, its economy and its political life still suffering from the civil war that racked the country during the latter part of the 20th cent.
Conditions are ideal for the cultivation of rice, by far the country's chief crop.
Corn, vegetables, fruits, peanuts, tobacco, cotton, and sugar palms are widely cultivated. By the 1990s, however, rubber plantings had been undertaken as part of a national recovery program, and rubber and rice were again being exported. The fishing industry has also been revived, but some food shortages continue. Until recently, inadequate transportation hampered exploitation of the country's vast forests, but by the mid-1990s timber had become the largest source of export income. Mineral resources are not abundant, but phosphate rock, limestone, semiprecious stones, and salt support important local mining operations.