Eighty-five percent of people in Chin State are in debt to local moneylenders after taking loans to buy food, according to an officer with the World Food Program (WFP) in Rangoon.
Speaking to The Irrawaddy on Thursday, WFP officer Siddharth Krishnaswamy said, “The Chins are constantly facing food insecurity. They are unable to pay for food, health and education as they have to pay off their debts.”
Based on data collected by the WFP in May from seven townships in Chin State, villagers in the areas of Htantlang, Tiddim and Tonzang are the worst affected, a WFP report said.
The report said that a decline in agriculture had led to a lack of food and employment in Chin State.
Joseph Win Hlaing Oo, a director of the Country Agency for Rural Development (CAD), a nongovernmental organization based in Rangoon, said that people in Chin State generally worked for six months, but then only had enough money for three months’ food.
He said the crisis had been caused by an infestation of rats followed by a drought in the area.
The CAD has initiated a “Food for Work” project in three townships: Haka, Lantalang and Matupi. The project encourages the communities to build roads and restore agriculture.
He said that the project could only help 30,000 people and there were an estimated 200,000 people in the three townships.
The Burmese military government put a ban on aid to the Chin, instead insisting that development work had to be undertaken in return for food.
“The people are not very happy because they only get food as a reward for their work,” said Joseph Win Hlaing Oo. “But they also need money for health and education.”
Van Lian Thang, a representative of the Chin Union Council, said that in Matupi Township there are many people who struggle through the day without enough food.
He said he expected more people to be affected with food insecurity during the rainy season because of the difficulties connected with traveling to the Indian border to buy supplies.
The group has accused the Burmese authorities of banning ethnic Chin people from receiving food supplies donated by Burmese in foreign countries.
A report by the WFP said 75 percent of the crops in the area had been destroyed by rats and 30 percent of the villagers surveyed had been forced to abandon their fields.
The rat infestation began in December 2007 in Chin State, causing hundreds of Chin families to flee to the Indian border where they sought to enter the country illegally to find work.
According to a Mizoram-based Chin relief group, the Chin Famine Emergency Relief Committee, about 100,000 of the 500,000 people in Chin State have experienced food shortages. It said that many people were surviving on boiled rice, fruit and vegetables.
At an average altitude of 4,000 feet (1,250 meters), Chin State is mountainous and isolated. The main livelihood of people is agriculture—mainly rice paddy—which is performed on a shifting cultivation or “slash and burn farming” basis.
Experts have said that a famine occurs about every 50 years in Chin State when the flowering of a native species of bamboo gives rise to an explosion in the rat population, which feed on the plant.
irrawaddy
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