Delicious
Digg
StumbleUpon
Newsvine
Facebook
Google
Yahoo
Technorati
One in ten Burmese is going to bed hungry and an estimated five million people do not have enough food, UN officials said yesterday. The hunger gripping rural communities has spread to cities because of the steep increases in the costs of fuel and other commodities which provoked last month's nationwide protests against the ruling military junta.
Burma used to be known as the rice bowl of Asia and, on paper at least, it still has a food surplus. But according to Paul Risley, an official with the World Food Programme, who has just returned from the country, many people are struggling to survive on meagre meals. "We can presently only provide food to about 500,000 vulnerable persons - far less than is needed," Mr Risley said. "There are points of real poverty and food insecurity in parts of Burma's urban areas.
"This has happened before but it is becoming a larger problem, for example, among particularly vulnerable groups such as HIV and Aids patients. We haven't yet talked to the regime about alleviating this but we are receiving requests from non-governmental organisations and other groups working in urban areas to investigate the problem."
In a visit planned before last month's bloody crackdown on pro-democracy protests, a WFP team including Mr Risley and Tony Banbury, its regional director for Asia, spent five days in Burma and visited the southern Shan stateat the heart of the Golden Triangle - once one of the world's most important areas of illegal opium cultivation. There, they found desperate poverty among the former opium farmers.
"Southern Shan state has a food surplus and we saw corn being harvested. Outside every house, corn cribs were brimming with corn and the rice was on the point of being harvested as well," Mr Risley said. "But the tragic thing is that, just minutes away from the main road, there are traditional mountain communities without access to land and without enough food.
"These are tribes who traditionally carry their wealth on their bodies in the form of silver and gold bracelets. In several villages we were told they were selling their bracelets to obtain food. We believe some of them are going back to opium production because they don't want to lose all their wealth."
Officials also visited the western state of Rakhine, formerly Arakan, which is home to hundreds of thousands of Rohingas - the predominantly Muslim people expelled from Bangladesh years ago after fleeing there from Burma, and who are now essentially stateless. "We have been feeding the Rohingas for 10 years and their conditions have not improved and their livelihood has not improved," Mr Risley added. "It is an intractable situation. It could be alleviated by economic and social reform, by the free movement of people, food and resources."
Similar problems of mass hunger are found in other border regions, including Karen tribal areas in the west which WFP officials were not allowed to see. "On most parts of the border, conflicts have stopped for the past 10 years but food insecurity remains owing to the inability of the government to prioritise the development and the feeding of its people," said Mr Risley. "The sale of commodities is controlled by an elite. The wealth of Burma is in its natural resources - oil, gas, timber, gems - and the income from this does not reach the people."
The UN estimates that one third of children under five are underweight and 10 per cent are classified as acutely malnourished or "wasted". Child mortality rates of 106 per 1,000 are among the worst in Asia.
One Burma analyst said last night: "The generals who took over in 1988 prided themselves on being more technocratic than Ne Win, the dictator from 1962, but they ignore the rest of the economy. They don't care whether rice gets to the people because they are earning $2bn a year selling natural gas to Thailand. They don't need to care about the economic distress in the rest of the country."
* Burma's military government announced last night the formation of a constitution drafting commission - another step in the junta's "road map" to democracy which is supposed to lead to free and fair elections.
© 2007 The Independent
10 Comments so far
Show AllQuote: "One in ten Burmese is going to bed hungry and an estimated five million people do not have enough food, UN officials said yesterday. ..."
I wonder; it doesn't really sound worse than the U.S.A. itself, where NO ONE helps feed the poor, that is, no govt or UN agency does, as also applies to the homeless. Clinton, who bogusly gets a lot of priase here from either liars or idiots, took care of making sure that the poor would not be able to get out of poverty; by ensuring that there's a max. of five years of welfare available per lifetime, and max. two consecutive years at a time, all while welfare is much too little for people receiving this cheap but better-than-nothing aid to get out of poverty, not even being able to afford a small apartment and food, very lucky if able to get an apartment and adequate food supply. The third world segment of the U.S. population is not cared about by either the U.S. govt or UN; and many people working full-time have to work two jobs in order to be able to afford an apartment and food, as well as transportation, while earning poverty wages but much more than people on welfare.
Enough the same applies in Canada, where welfare is not sufficient to be able to pay for a small apartment and adequate food, while additionally transportation, which is usually necessary in order to be able to find employment even at min. wage. The welfarers here are looked down upon by many comfortable Canadians, who consider that the welfarers must definitely want to be on welfare, instead of working for a much better living standard; all while ignoring the fact that jobs have been disappearing en masse from this country, too. Nope, they say, it's all the welfarers' faults, they want to be on such low stipend funds to live; they desire it, dream about having this third world economic state of living, etc.
Fuel increased by 100% to 500% in Myanmar says F. William Engdahl in the article I referred readers to in the prior post, above, but I have not seen any mention of what the price of fuel was before this skyrocketting hike; although he does also say that people of the country, many of the population, had to spend as much as 70% of their monthly incomes on food alone, so the fuel-price hike would surely be significant, but then not necessarily. It depends on what the price was, before, and how much the general population earns for income; the less they earn, the more impact the price hike would have. Yet he also states that it's not only fuel that increased in prices, but also other commodities.
Anyway, the power elites do NOT care; except for trying to satisfy their INSATIABLE greed. They are psychotically and pathologically, chronically, ... permanently and strongly obsessed, not just sociopathically but psychopathically; because their exercise of their greed is very violent, even if it is not overt violence like soldiers massacring innocent and unarmed civilians, f.e.
I'd be curious to know how much the general population of Myanmar earns for monthly income, for if, f.e., we took away 70% of a high-income earner's income, then he or she would still have enough left to be able to live certainly reasonably. The population of Myanmar is not that well off, but I'd still be curious to know what the actual impact is; for it is easy to state our views while based only on referring to percentage differences, which can be very deceiving.
I think F. Engdahl has taken into consideration that the general population of Myanmar is poor enough to begin with; was, and is ever more-so now. It's just that I'd like the details, nonetheless.
See the article by F. William Engdahl, for which I provided the title and a GR (homepage) link in my post on this other article.
http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2007/10/19/4686/?jal_edit_comments#c...
I guess it's best to do this, to refer people to the article in this manner, for many or all of the other articles I also provided titles for, all being posted at GR, and all likely available in the homepage, although maybe not the one(s) of September, well, these are all actually relevant to the events in Myanmar, which was only named Burma due to British colonialist rule.
As bad as the military junta govt of Myanmar is, there's far worse involved, and the Buddhist monks and many other people of Myanmar suffering today really have the IMF, World Bank, U.S. govt, and BIG OIL (and natural gas) corporations to thank for the extreme crimes against this country's population.
That theme is recurring ALL OVER THE PLANET.
WHAHHH WHAHHH WHAHHH!!!
"in a war which we seem uninterested in winning"
Which pretty much sums up what we are all about. Winning. Screw the Iraqis or the Burmese or Afghans, as long as we 'win' we are all good. I do not think the Burmese should be oppressed the way they are either, nor should they get screwed over AGAIN which is exactly what will happen if we 'dabble' with Burma.
Are Americans so seriously deluded that after 6 years (actually 100 years) of constant warfare and lies about democracy and all that bullshit, we seriously believe we can or want to 'save' Burma ?! When are we as a collective going to finally understand our govt has a single minded purpose and thats to further capitalism. We are NOT the good samaritans that we like to believe we are. We are toxic. We DO NOT have the best of intentions. We DO NOT care about democracy.
I was not aware it was "my" war. I did not vote for Bush, and I left the National Guard because I have no desire to waste my time/health/life in a war which we seem uninterested in winning, and which was pointless in the first place.
But, I do not think the Burmese should just be left to die because of it. THEY did not elect Bush after all.
"That seems to be the gist of the above three comments."
Well it depends ... if you are stupid enough to believe george bush is going to save the Burmese then you have a real problem. The gist of the above statements is that the U.S. (whether its bush or pelosi) have absoluitely no interest in saving Burmese lives and their involvement will only make it worse because they dont give a fuck about the Burmese .. they want a piece of the pie (Gas). The best your george bush could come up with is sanctions against the Burmese !!! Yeah ... lets screw them even more. Sanctions against the Iraqis these last 15 years did nothing but cause the death of a million Iraqis and this is BEFORE your friggin war.
But, George Bush is VERY BAD. So, all these Burmese should just die. That seems to be the gist of the above three comments.
You are right the United States should intervene in Burma and fix the humanitarian crisis, because we sure were able to end the hunger situation when we intervened in Afghanistan, I mean it is not like malnutrition and child morality has gone up since the United States went into Iraq, hey, we should make Burma the next Haiti - the poorest country in the western hemisphere - because our intervention there was sure able to fix those problems, and who could forget Guatemala, yep, the people definitely eat better since we forced our develop model down their throats with a few interventions, on yeah, and who could forget Kosovo - I mean, who could argue that bombing the hell out of the area, killing up to 5,000 people, putting the countries under a UN dictatorship, and forcing free market capitalism on the them was a bad thing, I'm just saying that I've never met a Nicaraguan who wasn't happy that the United States did all it could in the 1980s to liberate the country from the brutal communism of the Sandinistas, yep, yep, yep, nothing but good could come out of a United States intervention into Burma - oh never mind that the country is wedged between two nuclear powers - India and China - who are both economic rivals with the US and who support the junta; I'm sure that if we explain our reasons to them nicely - that we have the noblest intentions at heart, and that our only goal is to help liberate a struggling people, and as soon as that happens we will leave - that they will understand.
Call me a cynic but this is exactly what the U.S. needs to intervene and make Burma another client state.
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Southeast_Asia/IJ17Ae01.html
The US should just mind it's own damn business.