The New Nation - Internet Edition

Shahidul Islam

About 15 lakh people in Chittagong Hill Tracts (CHT) of Bangladesh, Mizoram State of India and some nearly inaccessible areas of Myanmar, which share common borders with the two countries, are facing acute food shortage due to infestation of rats, according to aid groups, including the UNDP, and news agencies.

A plague of rats rapidly followed, feasting on the bamboo's protein-rich avocado-like fruit, before swarming to consume the farmers' rice paddies, grain harvests and food stockpiles in this areas, they added.

"According to the Action Aid, up to a million people are now facing hunger alone in Mizoram, where the rats plague began in October last year. The rates started invading CHT (Bangladesh) areas in December creating famine for nearly 300,000 people and launch their campaign towards nearby areas of Myanmar in late January this year, the UNDP said. The fruit of the Melocanna baccifera, which flourishes across hundreds of thousands of acres of Mizoram, is delicious to rodents and attracts rats from neighbouring states and countries. Locals suspect it has aphrodisiac qualities for rats, fuelling their numbers.

Scientists have found that more baby rats survive when the bamboo has flowered as the adult male rats, which are known to eat their newborn offspring, tend to leave them alone when they have had their fill of fruit.

Bamboo flowers seeds are high in protein and, when the rats eat them, they breed four times faster than normal. As a result, litters of up to 13 rats survive and are ready to reproduce themselves within three months, researchers said.

The people of this vast bamboo growing areas spreading over parts of India, Bangladesh and Myanmar were apprehending ars that they might face famine between 2007 to 2009 due to the rat plague, which occurs on regular basis every 47 to 50 years, the scientists noted

The area experienced the last appearance of the bamboo flower and the famine, known locally as mautam, ('bamboo death'), in 1959, which triggered over 22 years of violent guerilla unrest in this areas, including Mizoram.

"Politicians had then dismissed villagers' warnings of imminent disaster as local folklore. This time nobody has questioned the bamboo legend," said Mrinal Gohain, of charity Action Aid.

'There were rats all over the fields. Farmers would go to harvest their crops and find that the entire field had been eaten overnight," he added according to report ran by London-based influential daily The Guardian yesterday.

Although no hunger deaths had yet been reported, stockpiles of food were rapidly dwindling and few villagers had enough money to buy the subsidised supply of relief rice, he said. Most farmers had no seed for new crops and the true impact of the disaster would only be felt later in the year.

A BBC report said the blossoming, the rat problem, and the food shortages began two years ago in India then moved into Bangladesh in January and have now headed south into Myanmar as well.

In the Chittagong Hill Tracts, many people remember that time as well. One of them is the 93-year-old king of the Marma tribe, Raja Aung Shue Prue Chowdhury.

He tells journalists that the rats then "were as big as pigs".

Mizoram's villager Gohain said, 'The crisis is unfolding and is going to get worse. We anticipate that if this continues we will see something terrible happening here.'

Sangram, a rat catcher in the remote village of Theihkyong in CHT (Bangladeshi), has never been busier and nor has his work been as important as it is now. He has placed rat-traps along field boundaries.

It has become more than a job. Sangram now needs the rats to keep his family members alive. They eat two bowls of smoked rat a day, accompanied by the wild roots he finds in the forest.

"My wife, my five children and I normally eat rice, but the rats have destroyed everything," the grim-faced Sangram said, adding,"All we have left are the rats and these wild potatoes."

We are in big trouble and want the people to realise that, said Raja Aung Shue Prue Chowdhury, said, adding, The luckier villagers in the worst-affected areas were living on one meal a day, he said, while thousands more were foraging in the forests for food, surviving on roots, herbs and leaves.

Meanwhile, the Army backed Caretaker Government has taken an extensive relief programme for the people of CHT, where about 5,00,000 residents have already migrated to nearby areas leaving their villages due to food shortage caused by the rat plague.

The Indian State of Mizoram in declared a disaster in December but the crisis has been largely unreported within India, where national media tend to pay little attention to the problems endured by the nation's 700 million rural population, preferring to focus on Delhi-centred political intrigue and Bollywood gossip, The Guardian observed.

The Indian Government and relief agencies are finally beginning to believe them and are waking up to the problem, which extends far beyond the boundaries of this single village.

No detail on official efforts to combat the rat-plague and food shortage could be available in Dhaka from Yangoon till filing of this last night.