BURMA: Junta Achieves Food Shortages Amidst Plenty

Marwaan Macan-Markar
IPS News

BANGKOK, Jan 17 (IPS) - By announcing a new programme to expand its work in military-ruled Burma, a U.N. food agency has shed more light on the dire economic realities faced by that country’s impoverished people.

The World Food Programme (WFP) plans to feed 1.6 million people living in remote, rural areas over a three-year period, beginning this year. It is a marked increase from the 500,000 people the agency has catered to so far in helping ‘’vulnerable communities to overcome chronic food shortages.’’

Most of the communities due to benefit belong to ethnic minorities in the South-east Asian nation. These regions were plagued by conflict for years, where Burmese troops fought ethnic rebels. Peace deals signed between the warring parties through the 1990s saw an end to the separatist struggles.

According to the WFP, a steady supply of rice will feature in the basket of food due to the minorities living in, among other places, the Kachin State, in north-eastern Burma, near the Chinese border. The other items include pulses, vegetable oil, salt and high-protein blended food.

But such a U.N. intervention comes despite Burma, also called Myanmar, being a substantial producer of rice. ‘’Myanmar produces large amounts of rice, much of it grown in the central delta region,’’ Paul Risley, spokesman for the WFP’s Asia office in Bangkok, said in an interview. ‘’All the rice for our programmes is domestically purchased.’’

Yet what has come in the way of the home-grown grain getting to the needy is a vast network of security checkpoints set up by the military and, in some areas, by ethnic militias. Such roadblocks have forced the movement of food by local traders to a trickle, at times. Clearance to move food in trucks from one state to another requires the approval of the military’s local area commander, for which bribes have become mandatory.

Even the country’s majority Burmans are not immune to these military-imposed hurdles, consequently increasing the number of people enduring food shortages. The WFP estimates that in all nearly five million people, just under 10 percent of the country’s 54 million population, suffer from food insecurity. The impact of the restrictions on transporting food and the poverty rates has resulted in nearly 36 percent of children under five years being underweight and malnourished, according to some studies.

Such limits placed on the movement of food have little to do with security concerns of the notoriously oppressive Burmese junta. They are a military solution to control the price of food commodities, including rice, across the country. ‘’The junta has very little understanding of economics. These roadblocks have been around for decades,’’ says Win Min, a Burmese national security expert teaching at Payap University in Thailand’s northern city of Chiang Mai.

‘’They have little security value for the junta. They were introduced to keep a check on the price of rice going up,’’ he explained in an interview. ‘’But the situation has become worse today. More checkpoints have come up. So the price of rice in one state is different to the price in the next.’’

The junta’s mishandling of the domestic rice trade is just one in a litany errors it has committed that has dismantled a once promising economy. When British colonisation ended in Burma 60 years ago, the country was known as a one of the world’s major rice exporters. ‘’(At) independence, in 1948, Burma was regarded as the South-east Asian nation ‘most likely to succeed’,’’ states ALTSEAN, a regional human rights lobby on Burma, in a recent report.

The decay set in after the military grabbed power in a 1962 coup. The strongman at the time, Gen. Ne Win, opted for a socialist agenda, titled the ‘Burmese Way to Socialism.’ It led to the nationalisation of all the major industries, banks and the international trading sector. Ne Win’s successors, including the current military leaders, opted for a more open economic agenda once they came to power, including a bow to more private sector activity.

The shift, however, produced little difference. ‘’The economic mismanagement of the current military junta, the State Peace and Development Council, is causing the collapse of social infrastructure and perpetuating serious threats to human security,’’ states ALTSEAN, which stands for the Alternative ASEAN Network on Burma. ‘’The military regimes that have ruled the country since 1962 have dragged the country into disgrace and economic ruin through gross economic mismanagement (and) corruption.’’

‘’The U.N. estimates that households are (currently) spending 70 percent of their incomes on food, with more than 90 percent of the population already living on less than one US dollar a day,’’ it adds.

Such dismal figures have brought into relief the paradox in the country, since Burma is awash with natural wealth, ranging from extensive oil and gas reserves to the world-renowned pigeon-blood rubies. The rewards from such wealth, however, have been denied to the public.

The pro-democracy protests on the streets of Rangoon and elsewhere in August and September last year revealed the public anger towards unbearable economic woes. The protests, which were brutally crushed, were triggered after the junta raised the price of oil by 500 percent in mid-August with no warning.

Thailand’s estimated two million registered and unregistered migrant workers from Burma also echo a tale of economic hardship. What began as a trickle in the 1980s, largely involving workers from ethnic communities along the border, turned into a flood by the end of the 1990s, with more Burmans from the centre of the country crossing the border in search of jobs.

‘’They have left because of unemployment and a lack of money to buy food and other items for their daily needs,’’ says Moe Swe, secretary-general of Yaung Chi Oo Workers Association, a Burmese labour rights group based along the Thai-Burma border. ‘’The economy has deteriorated and the people have to leave Burma if they want to survive.’’

The profile of Burmese who have entered Thailand in search of work to feed themselves illustrates the current predicament. ‘’Some of the migrant workers here used to be teachers, nurses, government sector employees, factory workers and farmers,’’ he told IPS.