Aung Moe proudly notes that the jewelry she sells in Yangon’s Bogyoke Aung San Market is all made of locally produced jade.

But she whispers, glancing to make sure armed guards and plainclothes police aren’t listening, she can’t buy jade from her own country anymore because most of the precious stone is exported to neighboring China or India.

“China buys all the good quality jade from Myanmar. Then they cut and polish it, and we have to buy it back,” she says, declining to give her real name for fear of retribution for criticizing the government.

Her troubles buying jade are typical of the oddities in Myanmar’s economy, which has left its population in ever-deepening poverty, squeezed by decades of mismanagement by the military rulers on one side and by a patchwork of western sanctions and boycotts on the other.

Sanctions were first imposed in the mid-1990s, when pro-democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi urged the world to put pressure on the junta to respect the results of 1990 elections won by her party.

The United States now has a total ban on Myanmar exports, while the European Union has more targetted measures including a travel ban on the junta, an arms embargo, and a ban on investment in state companies.

Separately, activists have led consumer boycotts against companies doing business here, and urged tourists to stay away.

The US sanctions dealt an especially severe blow to the country’s textile industry, costing the country some 80,000 jobs as factories closed their doors with the loss of their largest market, according to officials and analysts.

“It hasn’t produced any good results that have helped in any way,” independent politician Win Naing said of the sanctions.

“Let’s try to get something that would replace sanctions, that would be effective. But honestly I don’t know (what would work), because I don’t know how much the international community is prepared to do.”

As Myanmar’s generals are quick to point out, western sanctions have not deterred Asian nations from doing business here.

Sandwiched between China, India and Thailand, Myanmar has found trade partners more than willing to tap the country’s natural gas, timber, gemstone supplies to feed their own growing economies.

“Even though the Americans have put sanctions on us, those who need it are still begging from us,” Agriculture Minister Htun Oo said of the country’s natural resources.

“Because of our good relations with our neighbors, we have no problem exporting rice or other commodities.”

The junta’s long-stated concern is that the country grows enough rice to feed its 52 million population, as they remain keenly aware that high food costs helped spark the unrest in 1988 that brought down the last dictatorship.

“We prioritize self-sufficiency in rice. That is why we grow rice and have our own rice for local consumption,” Htun Oo said.

While inflation is estimated at around 40 percent, rice prices have remained relatively stable this year.

But a good rice supply alone has done little prevent a dire humanitarian situation, with the vast majority of the population living in poverty. Per capita GDP is estimated at only 163 dollars.

The UN’s World Food Programme warns that 40 percent of children under five are malnourished. UNAIDS estimates that up to 600,000 people have been infected with HIV, giving Myanmar one of the worst epidemics in Asia.

But western antipathy towards Myanmar has left the country with less international aid than many other troubled poor nations.

The World Bank estimates that aid in 2004 represents only about two dollars per capita in Myanmar, compared with 38 dollars in Cambodia or 53 dollars in communist Laos.

The leading funder of anti-AIDS programs in Myanmar, the Global Fund, pulled out in August, citing government limits on its movements, although it had also become the target of political pressure from a handful of US lawmakers and lobby groups.

One western analyst based here blamed the situation on the lack of political will to press Aung San Suu Kyi’s party and the generals into any kind of negotiation out of a 15-year political stalemate.

“There has never, even been a serious effort at mediating dialogue in Burma,” one western analyst based here said, referring to the country by its former name.

“What you have is all the easy things. You have the condemnations … the sanctions. But in reality nothing is really being done, there’s no serious effort to change things.”