NEW DELHI (AlertNet) - Tens of thousands of Bangladeshis in the impoverished southeast of the country are facing serious food insecurity due to an infestation of rats which are eating up food
stocks, crops and seeds, the European Union's aid department said
on Friday.
Around 130,000 people in the rugged Chittagong Hill Tracts (CHT) are grappling to feed themselves due to a three-year-long rat plague, brought on by the flowering of bamboo plants - a rare phenomenon which occurs in south and southeast Asia.
According to the European Commission's Humanitarian Aid and Civil Protection department (ECHO), every 50 years the bamboo plants produce flowers which, when consumed, cause the rats to reproduce at an accelerated rate.
"Even in normal years, when harvests are good and bamboo available for collection, food insecurity is especially acute in remote areas of CHT," said Abigail Masefield, ECHO's food assistance coordinator for South Asia.
"Discussions with communities have confirmed a significant reduction in the 2009 harvest compared to the normal harvest, with only around 30 to 50 percent of normal production level reported by all the communities visited."
LOST CROPS AND INCOME
The CHT, bordering India and Myanmar, are one of the most disadvantaged regions of Bangladesh, where more than 60 percent of the 1.3 million population are living below the poverty line, according to the U.N. Development Programme.
Thousands of landless Bengalis were settled in the 5,500-sq-miles (14,200 sq km) region under a government plan in the 1980s to ease population pressure in the plains, and also to defuse a 25-year tribal separatist insurgency which ended in 1997.
But relations between the largly Muslim settlers and the Buddhist tribals have been tense over land ownership in an area where cultivatable land is scarce.
Aid workers say affected populations have lost rice paddy, bananas and chilli crops. Other crops such as turmeric and ginger -- which are sold for cash -- have also been lost.
To further compound matters, the bamboo dies after flowering and takes five years to regenerate, impacting the income of populations who make a meagre but important income by selling bamboo to a local paper mill.
ECHO's Masefield said while the number of rats has decreased in recent months, wild pigs and monkeys in the forests are now destroying the remaining crops.
"This means that the traditional lean season -- March/April to August -- is set to be particularly acute and early during 2010.
ECHO as well as other organisations, like the U.N. World Food Programme, have been providing food and income-generating
activities to help affected populations.
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