Junta Demand for Higher Rice Production Derided

By WILLIAM BOOT

BANGKOK—The Burmese junta’s call for greater rice production for export using labor drawn from returning jobless migrant workers has been met with derision by aid workers and long-time Burma watchers.

Prime Minister Gen Thein Sein last week produced statistics that could not be verified for the country’s rice production and insisted that rice farmers must work harder to raise exports.

“Although Myanmar's [Burma’s] rice production has increased, it can be found that she has not been capable of producing more rice than the nations that are smaller and have [less] farmland than Myanmar,” Thein Sein was quoted in the government newspaper as saying. “Myanmar is to strive for ensuring local self-sufficiency in rice and [exports] about 3 million tons of rice annually,” he said.

What he did not say is that Burma’s main rice-growing region and its population are still struggling to recover from the devastation caused by Cyclone Nargis last May.

“One could point the PM to Burma's collapsed rural infrastructure, villages without viable roads connecting them to markets, fertilizer that's unavailable at a viable price, irrigation systems that have silted up, the fact that new variety seeds, pesticides, pumps, ploughs and other equipment is out of reach—and that's before Nargis,” said Sean Turnell, professor of economics at Australia’s Macquarie University and longtime Burma economy watcher.

Turnell, who also produces Burma Economic Watch, told The Irrawaddy that Nargis caused immense damage which is still impeding a return to anything like normal rice production in the main Irrawaddy delta growing region, causing “massive loss of farm animals, dykes destroyed, fields in some of the most productive areas inundated for a while with seawater, death and labor shortages, and a government that turns grant-in-aid into loans.”

Thein Sein said the labor shortage is easily solved by putting to work in the paddies returning Burmese made jobless abroad in recent weeks by the global economic crisis.

Although the junta claims the Irrawaddy delta and other hard-hit cyclone areas are in a phase of “reconstruction,” the inhabitants of the region are still struggling to survive and are dependent on aid from organizations including Médecins sans Frontières, Save the Children and the UN World Food Program.

A spokesman for the UN in Rangoon, speaking on condition of anonymity, said that the relief efforts have been inadequate and that the work of rebuilding is still in its infancy. According to a UN press release on Thursday, agriculture and early recovery sectors are lagging with currently only 25 percent and 39 percent of needs met respectively.

Burmese Agricultural Ministry has estimated the cost of rehabilitating the delta’s rice fields alone could exceed US $240 million, the UN Food and Agriculture Organization said.

Burma’s fragile economy is more than 50 percent dependent on agriculture, and approximately two-thirds of that is generated by the wrecked Irrawaddy delta region.

The country’s road network, in a state of disrepair long before the cataclysm of Nargis, has proved a hindrance and has delayed the arrival of supplies while much-needed fertilizer is, and has been for a long time, virtually non-existent. Sources in the region point out that corruption and mismanagement are also hindering the relief efforts.

Food shortages, and the desperate search for sustenance, prevent many farmers from properly rebuilding their homes, while finding clean drinking water is still a problem with many wells and other sources still in a state of contamination. In Pyapon District, aid workers have reported that vast swathes of farmland are still a long way from being ready for cultivation and that up to half the villagers are unemployed and without either cattle or seed.

In fact, the last thing the area needs is an influx of manpower, and human muscle, despite Thein Sein’s grandiose words, just isn’t enough—the regeneration process requires tractors, power tillers and cattle, all of which are in desperately short supply. The lack of diesel fuel is another serious problem, despite the increasing quantities being smuggled in from Bangladesh.

The regime recently announced that 5,000 power tillers have been distributed, but their whereabouts remain a mystery—sources report that very few new machines have been seen in the area, and the ones that have arrived are unfamiliar and all-but useless to their new owners: the majority of Burma’s farmers, having had negligible access to money for modern farming technology and equipment.

Turnell says Burma’s rural credit system is completely moribund—undermining the ability of Burma's farmers to buy equipment that they need.

“Less than 5 percent of the population has access to formal credit of any kind—the remainder get none at all, or rely on moneylenders who charge usurious interest rates that eliminate any profits,” Turnell told The Irrawaddy on Wednesday.

For a period leading up to World War II, Burma was the world’s largest exporter of rice. In the past four decades, since the country has been under military rule, Burma has seen its rice exports drop from nearly 4 million tonnes per year to an unverified figure of 600,000 tonnes quoted by the junta.