UN plans big rise in food aid to Burma

FE Team | Published: September 04, 2007 00:00:00 | Updated: February 01, 2018 00:00:00

Amy Kazmin, FT Syndication Service
BANGKOK: The United Nations' World Food Programme is seeking to increase dramatically the provision of emergency food aid in military-ruled Burma, especially to former poppy farmers impoverished by opium eradication campaigns.
The WFP aims to provide food assistance to a total of 1.6m people over the next two years in border areas, where the junta's restrictions on the movement of both rice and people - many of them ethnic minorities - are creating hardships.
"There is no reason why Burma should require food aid based on an examination of their natural resources," said Anthony Banbury, the WFP's regional director for Asia. "But for now, they do - and we have a responsibility to meet these pressing humanitarian needs."
The WFP's ambitious expansion plan - which will cost $52m (â‚¬38m, Â£26m) over two years - comes amid growing tension between the military junta and the aid community.
In June, the International Committee of the Red Cross lashed out at the government's "severe violations of humanitarian law" after the regime effectively barred it from visiting prisons and eastern border areas, where civilians are caught in the conflict between the army and rebellious ethnic militias, such as the Karen National Union.
The eastern conflict zone remains off-limits to the WFP as well. But the aid agency says it has secured permission to work in other remote, politically sensitive ethnic minority areas, where many struggle to get by.
"We have managed to get better access than other UN agencies to remote, difficult, challenging places," Mr Banbury said. "If we did not have the access we believed was needed to ensure legitimate distribution of resources, we would stop our work."
The UN has recently blamed the regime's "ill-informed and outdated socio-economic policies" for fuelling poverty, with about 10 per cent of Burma's 52m people thought to be too poor to meet their basic food needs.
Restrictions and taxes on transporting rice means prices in mountainous and impoverished border areas, inhabited mainly by ethnic minorities, are up to 30 per cent higher than in the Burmese heartland - making the essential commodity beyond reach of many families, the WFP says.
Recent poppy eradication campaigns have exacerbated poverty, as former poppy farmers have received limited assistance in growing alternative crops, and are also prevented from venturing out of their areas in search of work, the WFP says.
The recent sharp rise in subsidised fuel prices - which triggered a series of small but rare protests - is expected to put further upward pressure on rice prices, particularly in border areas which obtain the rice from distant parts of the country.