The UN Food and Agriculture Organisation is calling for $10 million in emergency farming equipment and seeds for parts of southern Burma devastated by Cyclone Nargis, to help plant the next rice crop. Meanwhile the UN’s World Food Programme has stopped emergency food shipments to the disaster zone after the country’s military dictators impounded the first shipment on arrival.

Cyclone Nargis, which hit southern Burma last Saturday, devastated the delta of the Irawaddy River, the country’s main rice growing region. Up to 100,000 may have been killed, and hundreds of thousands are homeless.

The WFP has said it will not deliver emergency relief unless it can supervise its distribution to ensure it reaches those most in need. The Burmese government, which violently suppressed popular protests of high food and fuel prices last September, is insisting on distributing foreign aid itself. Opposition campaigners fear the junta will give the aid preferentially to its supporters.

Burma’s people are among Asia’s poorest, and dependent on rice as a staple food. People in Asia on average consume 7 kilograms of rice per month, getting the rest of their nutrition from other foods. The Burmese eat on average 20 kg of rice a month, yet recent surveys found a third of children are malnourished, a third of those severely.


No harvest

The FAO says the storm washed away rice stores from the recent harvest, on which the many subsistence farmers depend. It warns that Burma is due to plant its next crop when monsoon rains start in June, but people have no equipment to do it.

“The hardest-hit villages lost all their farming assets, as well as the food stored for the rest of the year,” says Anne Bauer, head of emergency operations at FAO headquarters in Rome, Italy. “These poor farmers will not have sufficient resources to purchase seed and fertilisers, protect surviving livestock and replace lost ones.”

Rice prices on international markets hit all-time highs this month after increased worldwide demand and speculation on international commodities markets trebled the price, making it difficult even for the WFP to buy the rice it needs.

The survivors could soon be facing disease, too. Disaster experts say that contrary to popular belief, dead bodies do not spread disease. But Robert Hodgson of RedR, a British disaster relief charity, predicts that because of the high water table in the affected delta region, decomposing human and livestock remains will be hard to bury safely and could pollute water supplies.

Water-borne diseases from the survivors, meanwhile, might be a worse problem. Cholera, typhoid and dysentery are all present in Burma.

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