After reading this story now I know why they don’t allow many foreigners into Myanmar, and send minders out to make sure they don’t mingle too much with the natives. It’s not just the political repression they are covering up, it’s the starvation:
BANGKOK (Reuters) – Repressive state policies and a “dysfunctional” market in military-ruled Myanmar mean 5 million people do not have enough food in what was once the rice-bowl of Asia, the World Food Program (WFP) said on Wednesday.
“In a food surplus country like Myanmar, nobody should be going hungry, but millions are,” WFP Regional Director Tony Banbury said after a five-day trip planned well before last month’s bloody crackdown on pro-democracy protests.
“It used to be the bread-basket of this region. It can produce a food surplus very easily, but it is now failing to provide the food that its population needs,” he said, appealing for more money for WFP relief operations.
At the moment, the United Nations agency — one of the few aid organizations permitted to operate by the junta — is trying to feed 500,000 people, even though it estimates 5 million, nearly 10 percent of the population, are at risk. […]
Given that Myanmar, then called Burma, was one of Asia’s brightest economic prospects when it won independence from Britain in 1948, its health statistics are a shocking indictment of the military’s 45 years in power.
The U.N. estimates one-third of children under five are underweight and 10 percent are classified as “wasted”, or acutely malnourished. Child mortality rates of 106 per 1,000 are among the worst in Asia. Continued…
Authoritarian regimes invariably improve the economic situation in their countries — for the dictators and their cronies, that is. For everyone else, not so much. Turning a potential economic powerhouse into a basket case says a lot for the incompetence of Myanmar’s military rulers. Not unlike a certain other country whose overall debt (both personal and government) has reached levels never before seen, and where child mortality rates have been steadily rising, even as certain favored corporations receive unaccounted for billions of dollars in government aid from their government contracts.
By the way, how many aid dollars do you think the US government has contributed to the UN program that is desperately trying to feed even a small percentage of the starving people of Myanmar? Well, the answer may shock you, even if it isn’t really very surprising considering the compassionate conservatives who are in charge of such things:
The United States, which typically funds more than 40 percent of WFP [World Food Program] projects elsewhere, has contributed just $300,000, Britain nothing.
Then again, these are the same people who mostly lined Halliburton’s and Blackwater’s pockets with the government’s “hurricane relief” and “reconstruction” aid dollars after Katrina, while letting poor people rot in those toxic waste dumps otherwise known as FEMA trailers. Since I don’t think Halliburton operates to help starving people in Myanmar, and we aren’t likely to be promoting regime change there anytime soon (thus no money for Blackwater, etc.) I think we can safely predict that our government isn’t likely to add much to its aid contribution for the starving masses living under this particular tyrannical regime, even if they desperately want the same freedoms and rights we all used to enjoy.
But effecting regime change and spreading freedom and democracy is apparently limited to countries with major oil reserves. Sorry, Myanmar.
Very sorry.