With their rice paddies drenched in sea water and cattle gone, farmers in Burma's cyclone-hit Irrawaddy delta are struggling against huge odds to plant a new crop to avoid long-term food shortages.
"We have only until June to plant the main rice crop," one farmer said in the village of Paw Kahyan Lay, 40 km (25 miles) southwest of Rangoon.
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| A man sits on a damaged rice paddy near a refugee camp in Kyondah village at Irrawaddy delta. (Photo: AP) |
The ruling generals' main mouthpiece, the New Light of Myanmar, said there was an urgent need for tractors, power tillers, seed, fertilizer and fuel for the "timely cultivation in storm-affected areas".
Burma has appealed for US $243 million in aid to get rice farmers back on the land, and $20 million for new livestock.
The June planting, watered by the seasonal monsoon rains, produces the main rice crop in the delta, the "rice bowl of the Asia" in the days when Burma administered as part of the British empire.
A smaller summer harvest between December and March relies on irrigation and is not as critical as the June harvest, 80 percent of which is exported, mostly to Sri Lanka.
International aid groups and the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) said that while farmers faced near-impossible odds to get the crop in, they might be able to manage just enough to get by.
"If they can grow one acre of rice, that will be enough to provide for domestic needs until the end of the year," said Brien Agland, who heads relief efforts for CARE in Burma.
The UN estimates that 2.4 million people were severely affected by the cyclone, which also left 134,000 dead or missing, and says it may have to feed 750,000 people for months.
In the next three weeks, aid agencies face the huge task of finding seeds for new crops, draining saltwater from paddies, buying salt-tolerant rice varieties and bringing in buffaloes to plough fields.
"We will find animals in Myanmar [Burma], but they then have to be tamed to plough fields and that isn't easy," Agland said.
They are also competing against shattered infrastructure and the stifling bureaucracy of a military that has been in power for 46 years.
The only lucky break will be if the torrential rains of the last two weeks have washed out much of the saltwater from fields, as happened after the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami.
"We are racing against the clock," a FAO spokesman said. "But we hope that the ground at least may not be that bad. It has been raining hard and we hope much of the salt has been washed away."
ဘုိကေလးမွာ ဆန္တအိတ္ (၃) ေသာင္းခြဲ
ငါးဖမ္းေလွတစီး (၁) သိန္းခြဲေပါက္
NEJ / ၂၈ ေမ ၂၀၀၈
ဧရာ၀တီတုိင္း ဘုိကေလးၿမိဳ႕နယ္တြင္းရွိ အေထြေထြကုန္ေစ်းႏႈန္း (၁၉) မ်ိဳးႏွင့္ ပတ္သက္၍ ကုလသမဂၢ ဖြံ႕ၿဖိဳးေရးအစီအစဥ္ UNDP က စာရင္းထုတ္ျပန္ထားရာ ဆန္တၿပီ (၁,၅၀၀) က်ပ္ ရွိသည္ဟု ေဖာ္ျပထားသည္။
UNDP စာရင္းအရ ဘုိကေလးၿမိဳ႕နယ္ ေဒသခံေစ်းကြက္တြင္ ပဲဆီ တပိႆာ က်ပ္ (၄,၅၀၀) ရွိျပီး ဆားေစ်းမွာ တပိႆာ (၁,၄၀၀) က်ပ္ေပါက္သည္။ ဒီဇယ္ေစ်းက တဂါလံ (၇,၀၀၀) က်ပ္ရွိျပီး ဓာတ္ဆီေစ်းက တဂါလံ (၆,၅၀၀) ရွိသည္။ UNDP စာရင္းအရ ဘိလပ္ေျမ တအိတ္ (၁၁,၀၀၀) က်ပ္ေစ်းမွာ ရွစ္ေပသုံးေပ သြပ္တခ်ပ္ႏွင့္ ေစ်းခ်င္းတူေနသည္။ သဲတအိတ္ (၁,၅၀၀)၊ လက္ကုိင္ထြန္စက္တလုံး (၁၃၀,၀၀၀)၊ ေမာ္ေတာ္ဘုတ္တစီး (၃၅၀,၀၀၀)၊ ငါးဖမ္းေလွငယ္တစီး (၁၄၀,၀၀၀) စသျဖင့္ မုန္တုိင္းလြန္ ေပါက္ေစ်းမ်ားကုိ ေဖာ္ျပထားသည္။
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