BANGKOK – A United Nations official is blaming the Burmese military government’s restrictive agriculture policies for driving villages in two border regions of the country into further poverty.
The government restricts the free movement of agriculture products in these regions and prevents the trade of farm products between ethnic groups, Sheila Sisulu, deputy executive director of the World Food Program (WFP), said at a press conference here Tuesday.
"The policies of the government are impoverishing these people," Sisulu added. "The market is not open to the farmers."
Sisulu made her comments following a four-day visit to Burma, also known as Myanmar, where she inspected the projects of the UN food relief agency. That included a visit to the Northern Shan State, where the WFP is providing relief to farmers who were former poppy growers.
Since October 2003, the WFP has been supplying rice to 180,000 people in the Northern Shan State.
The bulk of its effort, though, is directed toward the Northern Rakhine State, in the west of the Southeast Asian nation, which is home to the minority Rohingya community. The WFP is currently assisting an estimated 420,000 people who were displaced due to an internal conflict in 1991.
The WFP’s criticism of Rangoon’s agriculture and trade policies amplify the charge made by the International Crisis Group (ICG), a Brussels-based think tank, in a report released last week.
In "Myanmar: Aid to the Border Areas," ICG revealed that most border areas are "highly or moderately vulnerable in food security terms, with Shan, Northern Kachin and Chin states being the worst off."
The Rakhine and Chin states "have the highest levels of income poverty in the country," it added. "Child malnutrition is most serious in the Rakhine State, where almost 50 percent of children under five suffer from severe or moderate under nourishment."
According to the WFP, nearly a third of the children under five years are malnourished across the entire country.
What prevails in the Rakhine state typifies the problem local farmers in the border areas are up against. "In the Northern Rakhine State, local army commanders have taken control of all commerce by establishing an agent system that requires licenses for any sale of livestock, crops or other produce in village markets," the ICG report states.
The Rakhine State is near the Burmese-Bangladesh border, while the Chin State is near the Burmese-Indian border. The Kachin and the Shan states are near the Chinese border.
The military government is also undermining food security by preventing farmers in the border regions to work on their land, a relief worker assisting Burma’s minorities said in an interview.
In some parts of the Shan area, for instance, people are being relocated to inferior lands, while in other regions "the farmers’ land is being confiscated by the regime," she revealed.
"Food production is also affected due to forced labor imposed by the military. The farmers cannot work on their lands during this period," she added.
The consequence of that is reflected in the high percentage of farmers or people from farming communities who make up the estimated 140,000 refugees in camps along the Thai-Burma border.
"The majority of the people in the camps are rural farmers," says the relief worker. "They are Karen, Karenni and Shan."
Burma’s picture of malnutrition and poverty today is a stark contrast to the image of self-sufficiency and food security it was known for prior to its independence in 1948.
The events of 1962, when the military took over power in a coup and has maintained its iron grip ever since, contributed toward its downward slide. By 1987, according to reports, Burma had entered the leagues of the world’s poorest countries.
"Before the coup, Burma was known as the rice bowl of Asia due to its agriculture output," Soe Aung, foreign affairs spokesman for the National Council of the Union of Burma, a group of Burmese political exiles, told IPS.
The current food scarcity is the making of the military government, he added. "The junta does not supply the military in the ethnic areas with all their needs and the local army officers survive on extortion, taking over farming land and the forced labor of farmers."
According to available reports, Burma’s military strength has grown from an estimated 190,000 in 1988 to over 400,000 by 2002.
The ICG asserts that the nearly five decades of conflict between various insurgent groups linked to the country’s ethnic communities and the central government have "impoverished the state and devastated local communities, particularly in the ethnic minority-populated border areas."
"More than a million people are estimated to have died in these hidden wars, while millions more are wasting away in abject poverty," it adds. "Most border areas fall significantly below the national average on socioeconomic indicators."
