BURMA: Top UN Official Reports Gross Malnutrition, Poverty

By Marwaan Macan-Markar Reprint | | Print |

Marwaan Macan-Markar

BANGKOK, Aug 5 2005 (IPS) - A journey from the Burmese capital of Rangoon to the country’s borders reveals a picture of hungry, malnourished children that is ”serious” and ”getting worse,” a top United Nations official reported Friday.

”Malnourishment is much larger in the border territories,” James Morris, executive director of the World Food Programme (WFP), told reporters at the end of a tour of Burma, now rare for a UN official. ”There are a huge number of people who desperately need help”.

In some areas along the border, chronic malnutrition among children under five years may be ”between 60 to 70 percent,” said Morris who paid a four-day visit to the military-ruled South-east Asian nation to see for himself an emerging crisis of hunger and poverty.

Chronic malnutrition across the country is just as severe. One out of every three children under five years is ”chronically malnourished,” he confirmed. And as many children are physically stunted due to poverty and lack of adequate nutrition among Burma’s 53 million people, adds a WFP background note.

Such a high percentage of malnutrition and hunger among children is almost as severe as the plight faced by children in sub-Saharan Africa, where an estimated 31 percent of children under five years suffer from malnutrition.

Yet, the dismal reality in Burma is not an exception in South-east Asia or the Pacific, says a nutrition expert at the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF). ”If you exclude China, the child malnutrition levels in east Asia and the Pacific is close to 31 percent,” said Stephen Atwood, regional health and nutrition advisor at UNICEF’s east Asia and Pacific office.

The countries where there is upward of 20 percent malnutrition among children under five years include Cambodia, East Timor, Laos, Indonesia, Papua New Guinea, the Philippines and Vietnam. ”Cambodia is the worst affected,” said Atwood. ”Nearly 45.8 percent of children below five years are malnourished,” Atwood told IPS.

Children who suffer from such deprivation are not only stunted but also show ”poor cognitive functions,” he added, pointing out further that mortality rate is high among such children. ”In this region, there are 1.1 million deaths annually of children under five, of which some 53 percent are closely associated with under -nutrition”,he said.

What ails Burma is the result of an iron wall of restrictions that the country’s military regime has imposed, preventing easy movement of food supplies.

Morris is the most senior UN official to visit Burma since pro-democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi was place under house arrest in May 2003.

”Current agricultural and marketing policies, and restrictions on the movement of people, make it very difficult for many of those at risk to merely subsist,” Morris said at the Foreign Correspondents Club of Thailand.

To illustrate this point, he referred to the 5500 metric tons of rice the WFP has purchased from local rice producers for the hungry in the northern Rakhaine state, which is close to the Bangladesh border. ”Only 430 tons of rice have been distributed because of impediments,” he said.

Other hurdles imposed by the Burmese junta include a 10 percent ‘export tax’ that the WFP has to pay for every metric ton of rice it buys in Burma and levies at the frequent checkpoints that trucks transporting food have to pass through.

Morris also conceded that the threat to food security in Burma was also due to other harsh policies imposed by the dictatorship, including the practice of forced labour, forced appropriation of land and driving villagers to work in unproductive land.

The reality in the Rakhine region where the WFP has been supplying food since 1994 is symptomatic of the problems local rice farmers face across the country. All agricultural and commercial activity comes under the area’s military commander and his permission is needed to sell food crops in the local markets.

The plight of Burma’s children reveals the depth to which the country has sunk since the military came to power through a coup in 1962, say political exiles, pointing to the years of food surplus after the country gained independence from the British in 1948.

”Burma was exporting about three million tons of rice in 1948,” Sann Aung, a member of the council of ministers of Burma’s democratically elected government in exile, told IPS.

”Crony capitalism and interventions by the military to take over the rice market since 1962 are the reasons for this hunger crisis,” he said. ”Starvation became obvious by the mid 1960s,” he added.

He said the military regime, which renamed the country Myanmar, has shown little mercy to farmers who have protested against restrictions imposed over the last 40 years.

”They made that clear in 1967 when Burma experienced a major rice shortage for the first time,” he explained.

”Many people started protesting in the Arakan state but the military regime did not tolerate it. The demonstrators were shot by the government and nearly 100 died”, Sann Aung said.