Rats causing food crisis in Myanmar

Straits Times 23 Jun 08;

LONDON - AFTER the fury of Cyclone Nargis, a new disaster is looming in Myanmar: Packs of rats that swarm through the hills once every 50 years to consume everything in their path, a British newspaper reported yesterday.

The latest human disaster is unfolding in the jungle-covered mountains of Chin state, far to the north of the Irrawaddy delta where 134,000 people died last month, the Daily Telegraph said.

The plague of rats happens twice a century, when bamboo forests produce flowers and seeds, then wither and die for five years in a phenomenon known locally as mautam, or bamboo death.

Villagers believe the bamboo seeds are a kind of aphrodisiac for the rodents, whose numbers explode until all the seeds have been eaten. Then they turn on villagers' rice stocks, stripping ripening corn and paddy in the fields.

The regime's generals will permit no food aid or humanitarian workers into affected areas in a repeat of their callous refusal last month to permit emergency aid sitting in foreign ships off Myanmar's coast to be distributed to cyclone survivors, the newspaper said on its website.

Exiled Chin leaders say villagers who are too weak to flee over the border into India have already begun to die. They fear thousands more now face a lingering death in the deep bamboo forests where most of the state's million-strong population of Christian tribal people live.

The Chin is one of Myanmar's many minority ethnic groups.

Ms Cheery Zahau, 27, from the Women's League of Chinland, met British Prime Minister Gordon Brown in London this week to ask for help.

She said: 'The reports that are trickling out to India are heartbreaking. They tell of dehydrated children dying of diarrhoea and the poorest and weakest being left behind as stronger villagers start to escape over the border to where there is food.'