CONTRA MALTHUS:

Junta Achieves Food Shortages Amidst Plenty (Marwaan Macan-Markar, Jan 17, 2008, IPS)

The World Food Programme (WFP) plans to feed 1.6 million people living in remote, rural areas over a three-year period, beginning this year. [...]

According to the WFP, a steady supply of rice will feature in the basket of food due to the minorities living in, among other places, the Kachin State, in north-eastern Burma, near the Chinese border. The other items include pulses, vegetable oil, salt and high-protein blended food.

But such a U.N. intervention comes despite Burma, also called Myanmar, being a substantial producer of rice. ‘’Myanmar produces large amounts of rice, much of it grown in the central delta region,’’ Paul Risley, spokesman for the WFP’s Asia office in Bangkok, said in an interview. ‘’All the rice for our programmes is domestically purchased.’’

Yet what has come in the way of the home-grown grain getting to the needy is a vast network of security checkpoints set up by the military and, in some areas, by ethnic militias. Such roadblocks have forced the movement of food by local traders to a trickle, at times. Clearance to move food in trucks from one state to another requires the approval of the military’s local area commander, for which bribes have become mandatory.

Even the country’s majority Burmans are not immune to these military-imposed hurdles, consequently increasing the number of people enduring food shortages. The WFP estimates that in all nearly five million people, just under 10 percent of the country’s 54 million population, suffer from food insecurity. The impact of the restrictions on transporting food and the poverty rates has resulted in nearly 36 percent of children under five years being underweight and malnourished, according to some studies.

Resources are unlimited, we just distribute them badly sometimes.

Posted by Orrin Judd at January 17, 2008 5:44 PM