Cyclone Death Toll Rises Above 22,000

Cyclone Death Toll Rises Above 22,000
Food Worries Emerge As Rice-Growing Area In Myanmar Was Hit
By JAMES HOOKWAYMay 6, 2008 4:57 p.m.
BANGKOK, Thailand -- The death toll from the cyclone that hit Myanmar climbed to more than 22,000 and could go far higher.
Myanmar's military government, which has often tried to isolate the country, has welcomed international help -- and many nations have pledged it. But so far few supplies are getting in, and international aid agencies are worried the toll could mount in the devastated Irrawaddy River delta region if relief doesn't reach victims quickly. Myanmar state radio said more than 41,000 people are missing, nearly all in them in the delta.

Reuters
People traveled in a boat past destroyed wharves at a port on a swollen river in Yangon Tuesday.
For the aid agencies, the calamity is causing big worries about food, as the cyclone hit a major rice-growing area. There are worries first about food for Myanmar and then about how the disaster could drive up the cost of bringing food to other crisis-afflicted parts of the world.
With world grain stocks at their lowest since the 1970s and the cost of rice nearly tripling since the beginning of this year, providing emergency food aid to disaster-struck countries has become much more expensive.
United Nations relief officials said Tuesday that getting food and water to hard-hit areas is a challenge because of widespread flooding. Richard Horsey, a spokesman for the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, said much of the damage was caused by a violent storm surge that flowed in from the sea and submerged much of the delta region.
Mac Pieczowski, who heads the International Organization for Migration office in Yangon, said in a prepared statement that "from the reports we are getting, entire villages have been flattened and the final death toll could be huge."
Myanmar is in desperate need of aid after a cyclone hit the country over the weekend. The United Nations, U.S. and Australia have already agreed to contribute.
It isn't immediately clear how much food aid Myanmar might need. The U.N. World Food Program has this year appealed to donor countries for an additional $756 million in funding to help it cover the soaring cost of providing food to needy countries, which historically have struggled to adequately feed themselves.
But a disaster like the cyclone that slammed into the swampy, rice-growing delta region of southern Myanmar exacerbates the funding problem because some poor nations, including Sri Lanka and Bangladesh, had been hoping to supplement their own supplies with imports from Myanmar.
Now, these countries -- and Myanmar -- may have to approach other sellers to make up shortfalls in their own domestic production at a time when many larger rice producers such as Vietnam and India are curbing exports to ensure their own supply of the staple grain.
Thailand, the world's largest exporter, is among the few big producers not to curtail rice sales. It is taking on the lion's share of supplying rice to other developing countries. Thai rice prices are now at $920 a metric ton, down 10% from last week, but still almost three times higher than at the beginning of 2008.
Rice traders say the international market hasn't fully priced in the cost of a significant natural disaster afflicting a large, rice-growing country such as Myanmar. Parts of Asia are prone to highly damaging storms. The Philippines is regularly battered by typhoons. Bangladesh, like Myanmar, is a low-lying delta plain vulnerable to cyclones; in November, a cyclone barreled into the country, destroying at least 600,000 tons of rice and killing more than 3,000 people. India depends on a good monsoon to ensure its 1.1 billion people are adequately fed without dipping into its stockpiles.
So the Myanmar cyclone could send prices higher, some rice traders suggest.
Associated Press
Locals in Yangon make their way past a fallen tree after the cyclone.
"At the moment, the market is pricing in what it knows -- the impact of the biofuel phenomenon, increasing demand from China and India and high oil prices," says Vichai Sriprasert, president of one of Thailand's largest exporters, Riceland International Co. "The situation is already dangerous without other factors such as natural disasters which haven't happened yet."
"The cyclone certainly complicates matters," says Paul Risley, a spokesman with the World Food Program in Bangkok. "It blew through the critical rice-growing areas of the country and it seems the harvest was only partially completed. This could represent a substantial loss to the country's rice output."
Before gaining independence from Britain in 1948, Myanmar -- which is also known as Burma -- was one of the world's biggest rice exporters. Since a military government took control in 1962 and introduced a socialist-style economy, production has slumped. However, Myanmar analysts say the country has managed to improve its rice production in recent years. Officials at the Food and Agriculture Organization of the U.N. say it produces about 30 million metric tons of rice a year, compared with Thailand's 30.5 million tons.
Most of this crop is consumed domestically, or lost to wastage or substandard milling, but in recent years Myanmar has begun to export some rice. Before the cyclone, the FAO forecast the country would sell 600,000 tons overseas -- mostly to Bangladesh and Sri Lanka. State-run media said Myanmar's leaders were confident of producing enough rice this year to feed the country's 52 million people.
But with many rice mills destroyed, distribution networks in tatters and large tracts of rice-growing land in the muddy, flat delta of the Irrawaddy still under water, traders in Bangkok say Myanmar may have to resort to importing rice.
Information on the ground in Myanmar is still sketchy, compounded by the country's secretive military government and poor infrastructure. A magazine run by Myanmar dissidents in Thailand, called Irrawaddy, said prices of gasoline, cooking oil and rice have doubled since the cyclone struck.
State-run radio announced that in badly hit areas, Myanmar's rulers are postponing a referendum Saturday on a new constitution. Political uncertainty pervades in the country eight months after soldiers brutally suppressed pro-democracy demonstrations in the main city, Yangon.
The opposition National League for Democracy said in a prepared statement that proceeding with the referendum, which critics describe as an attempt to legitimize military rule, is "unacceptable."