The Bamboo Famine

Myanmar has had more than its share of humanitarian crises in recent years. The overall situation is well-summarized by Doctors without Borders.

What is even less well known than the general state of affairs in Myanmar is a famine that has struck the area around the town of Ccpur. Bamboo grows wild in that area, and is an important source of food for the people and animals who live there. However, once every 50 years, the bamboo blooms and forms fruit. This fruit and the seeds inside are a rich food source for the rats that live in the bamboo fields. With an abundant food source, the rats thrive and reproduce at an alarming rate. More and more rats survive to maturity as they sate themselves on the fruit of the twice-a-century bloom. The problem occurs when the bloom is over.

When the fruit from the bamboo is gone, the artificially high population of rats must search elsewhere for food. As cwnewz.com reports, “Once the rats have finished eating the bamboo plants, they plow their way through other fields, devouring grain, corn and rice. The rats even dig up and eat the seeds farmers have planted in the ground.” As a result, famine arrives closely on the heals of the bamboo bloom. The phenomenon is such a part of life in this region that they have a word for it: mautam (which translated means “bamboo famine”).

Photo by Ashley Clements

This century’s first mautam is blamed for 40 deaths and has left over 100,000 people on the brink of starvation. The infamously inept government has been slow to provide aid to the people living in that area. There are a few Christian relief workers in that area (ccpur is a predominantly Christian area of the country), but otherwise there does not seem to be a way to get aid to these people. Pressure from other governments could help prod the Myanmar government to provide better aid, but since I have been unable to find this famine reported in a western news source, the chances of that seem very slim.