Two years after a devastating cyclone battered Myanmar’s Irrawaddy delta in May 2008, leaving 138,000 dead and over 2.4 million homeless, people in the affected areas say they’re still troubled by ghosts at night — ghosts of fathers, mothers, husbands, wives, or children killed by the cyclone — and every night after dusk, village guards clang iron bars as they go on their rounds to assuage people’s fears.
Time has yet to heal the many scars left by Cyclone Nargis on the delta’s poor farming and fishing population. Whipped by 200-km-per-hour winds and 12-ft-high tidal surges, people had no way of saving their homes or fields or stores. At least 200,000 head of cattle were killed, more than 780,000 hectares of paddy fields were ravaged, and some 707,500 metric tonnes of stored paddy and milled rice were destroyed. The government has done little to put the hapless villagers back on their feet while international aid agencies, trying to help, have faced all kinds of impediments.
Some 500,000 people still lack shelter or work. Food is scarce, drinking water is insufficient, and a fierce summer has dried off water bodies that could have served as alternative water sources. Embankments damaged by Nargis remain mostly unrepaired or ill-repaired. Dispossessed of land and with little credit available, survivors live by scrounging whatever they can lay their hands on. On days that officials are on visit, they can’t even beg openly on the streets and are arrested if they do.
Yet, the Irrawaddy delta is Myanmar’s rice bowl. This is where the main expansion of the country’s rice area has taken place. Anything that happens to it, therefore, is bound to affect the country’s agriculture and, consequently, its exports. If, as the Asian Development Bank (ADB) suggests, Myanmar’s net annual agricultural growth has been sliding for years, periodic droughts and floods aren’t the only ones to blame. The government has utterly failed to take adequate protective measures in the very region where they matter most.
Coastal embankments, built mostly in the 1970s, encompass only some 162,500 hectares of delta cropland (against the country’s total rice area of 6 million hectares), but even these are in a very poor state and need urgent rehabilitation. Large tracts of cropland still remain prone to flooding during the monsoon. What’s more alarming, most of the mangrove forests along the coast have been allowed to be lost to shrimp farming. Researchers say that almost 85 per cent of mangroves in the Irrawaddy delta were destroyed between 1924 and 1999, and the damage continues.
Lessons could have been learnt from neighbouring Bangladesh, where losses of lives and crops have been significantly reduced through effective protective measures. Between the Bhola super-cyclone of 1970 that killed 500,000 people and destroyed 400,000 homes and the Sidr in 2007 that left 3,000 dead (notice the difference), Bangladesh has developed a dependable system of warning sirens, evacuation routes, and elevated shelters that has helped keep casualties down. There are polders stretching up to 100 km inland and nearly 10,000 km of embankments along the coastal belt. Many embankment slopes have been reforested, and, under a Comprehensive Disaster Management Programme, whose first phase has just been completed, policies aimed at risk reduction are now better focused, agencies are better coordinated, and workers at the union level are better trained to handle emergencies.
A basic protection system is thus in place, which might have been a reason why the toll from May 2009’s Cyclone Aila was a meagre 200, a seemingly unbelievable figure in Bangladesh’s context. Of course, things could still go wrong and future disasters might inflict severer damages in terms of life and property. But if they do, it would be easier now to pinpoint causes and order remedies. It’s true, a year after Aila, 200,000 of the victims are still waiting for shelter and safe drinking water. But that’s more a case of administrative tardiness than of systemic failure.
That’s not the case with Myanmar, where dictatorship is an obstacle and relief can’t be demanded. Nevertheless, certain things can be achieved even in a dictatorship, if only a credible, authoritative third party, like ADB, takes up the task. To my mind, especially as the dangers of a global climate change become increasingly imminent, there’s a strong case for launching a regional cooperation initiative for deltaic Asia, where problems are similar and solutions could be, too.
A regional initiative would allow experiences to be exchanged at various levels, basic protective measures and procedures to be standardised, and technologies innovated by institutions like the International Rice Research Institute to be put to best possible use to minimise immediate losses of lives and property and strengthen post-disaster recovery. NGOs are simply not fit for such a task as the issues involved are broad, multi-dimensional, and complex, and have implications for policy making.
