To understand what's going on
now, and what the Myanmar government is doing, one needs only to understand
three numbers:
5%
15%
30
The 5 per cent of Myanmar's
population affected by cyclone Nargis accounts for
roughly 15 per cent of the rice produced in the country.
For that 15 per cent to get
harvested, all the seed has to be in the ground by July 30 to catch the summer
monsoon.
What the Myanmar government
has to do is quite simple.
It has to get the cyclone
victims out of the relief camps and back into their villages, hope they can
scrape together the bare necessities of shelter and food to sustain a working
life, get them the wherewithal to plow and seed their fields, and make sure
they finish up the planting in eight weeks from today - and 12 weeks after the worst natural disaster in the country's history.
In other words, I would
suspect that the Myanmar government is conducting one of the last great
displays of socialized shock labor mobilization that we might witness in our
lifetimes.
The alternative - letting the survivors recover their shattered lives and health
in relief camps under the watchful eye of international humanitarian
organizations at the expense of the monsoon padi - is,
for the junta, almost inconceivable.
Missing the monsoon padi
means Myanmar's rice production collapses. Instead of exporting hundreds of
thousands of tons of rice, it would have to import hundreds of millions of
dollars worth of rice to avert food shortages in the rest of the country.
Missing the monsoon padi
means relying on the kindness of strangers and the generosity of the
international community to make it through a 15-month food crisis.
Bloomberg described
the situation using the genteel diction of NGO-speak:
Relief workers have a window
of only a few weeks until the end of June to help farmers in the delta start
planting rice if they are to avoid missing the crucial monsoon season, Diderik de Vleeschauwera, spokesman for the UN's Food and Agriculture
Organization, said yesterday, according to the UN's IRIN news agency.
"Our top priority is to have
the rice crop in during the month of June, so there will be at least some rice
harvest before the end of the year and the pressure will be off on food aid
needs,'' de Vleeschauwer said. "If they cannot
plant, the country will have a shortage of rice and be reliant on food aid
beyond the emergency relief phase.''
The Myanmar government is
already emptying disaster relief camps of not particularly happy or healthy
survivors and putting them to work on compulsory labor projects to rebuild the
delta's infrastructure and prepare for the monsoon padi.
|
The International Development
Enterprises, a non-government organization working to boost agricultural
production in Myanmar, is distributing seeds and fertilizers to 150,000
households that are ready to plant.
"We are madly rushing,''
Debbie Aung Din, country director for IDS in Myanmar,
said, according to IRIN. "The latest they can plant is July 30, but they are
going to have to prepare their land right now. It's a matter of getting seed
into their hands, as well as helping with tilling.''
"Reliant on food aid beyond
the emergency relief phase" is probably not a place the Myanmar government
would like to be.
Given the rather meager haul
of pledged aid at the donors' conference in Yangon on May 25, the junta
undoubtedly believes the West would be happy to expend the relative pittance
needed to succor cyclone victims in their camps - while hoping that the need to import food will force dangerous concessions to Western
demands for supervision of the aid process and political dialogue with the
democratic opposition or, at the very least, drain the purported and
purportedly massive illicit financial reserves of the regime.
Given this situation, it is
not surprising that the Myanmar regime curtly denounced "chocolate-bar relief"
from the international community in the wake of the disappointing donors'
conference and advised its weary citizens that there was no alternative to
bootstrap self-reliance.
The Myanmar government is
already emptying disaster relief camps of not particularly happy or healthy
survivors and putting them to work on compulsory labor projects to rebuild the
delta's infrastructure and prepare for the monsoon padi.
If the exhausted farmers of
the delta are able to get the planting in under the watchful eye of the brutal
Myanmar military and an at least partial harvest is gathered in the fall,
Myanmar will be able to negotiate the international terms of engagement from a
position of relative strength - and defy the inchoate indignation of the world.
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