Just Blame Global Warming and Let Them Die

From where I'm sitting, that will probably be how the junta leaders treat Cyclone Nargis. It has turned out to be an incredible disaster, and it has all the signs of getting worse. The International Herald Tribune has a summary of ongoing events.

Foreign aid workers in Burma have concluded that as many as 50,000 people died in Saturday’s cyclone, and two to three million are homeless, in a disaster on a scale comparable with the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami.

The official death count after Cyclone Nargis stood at just under half that by 1300 GMT today, at around 22,500 people dead plus a further 41,000 missing.

But due to the incompleteness of the information from the stricken delta of the Irrawaddy river, UN and charity workers in the city of Rangoon privately believe that the number will eventually be double that.

"We are looking at 50,000 dead and millions homeless," Andrew Kirkwood, country director of the British charity Save The Children, told The Times.

As the hours pass, the death toll is expected to jump considerably. These two satellite images from spaceref.com tell the story, the first from April 15, 2024 and the second from May 5, 2008. These images are provided from the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA's Terra satellite. They use a combination of visible and infrared light to make floodwaters obvious. According to spaceref.com, water is blue or nearly black, vegetation is bright green, bare ground is tan, and clouds are white or light blue. Click for better resolution.

The US Navy is standing by, but the closest ships are the Essex ESG scheduled to start the Cobra Gold 2008 exercise on Thursday with Thailand. The ships are 4-5 days away and have yet to receive orders to leave. The USNS Mercy (T-AH 19) which departed San Diego last week is 3 weeks away. Both the Kitty Hawk and Nimitz are at sea, but both are also near Japan. With the military rejection of US assistance, it is being left up to regional nations to prevent a colossal tragedy. India has sent two ships. China is throwing money at the problem, and more money is pouring in from around the world to aid agencies, some of which are yet to get permission to help. The military has a history of believing aid agencies are spies, and isn't very cooperative.

You have to work hard and read dozens of different stories to get the scope of the impending disaster. Myanmar has 53 million people, and about 25 million live in the 5 disaster states, most of which are flooded out. The primary occupation in the disaster region is farming, it is rice country and accounts for 40% of the food grown in in Myanmar. Typically rice is cultivated during the monsoon season, which starts later this month. Given the disaster it will be an enormous challenge to get next years crop down in time. As long as the rice from last years crop wasn't stored in the devastated areas, there shouldn't be any immediate food shortages for now, but the future looks grim.

Reading through news reports it stands out how much frustration there is in the aid community. The secretive nature of the military and junta leaders have become an enormous roadblock to getting international aid into the country. With the farmland in the southern delta taking most of the damage, the survivors need to get back to work within the next week in order to get even some crop down in time for next year. That is looking very unlikely.

With rising food costs around the world, this could not have come at a worse time for the Burmese people, or the rest of the world. If food shortages occur in Myanmar, the food will have to come from somewhere else, and with rising food costs globally this will just exacerbate existing global shortages.