A man sells eels in a slum in Yangon, Myanmar.
Yangon:
After the first wave of coronavirus hit Myanmar in March, Ma Suu, 36, closed her salad stall and pledged her jewelry and gold to buy food to eat.
During the second wave, when the government issued a stay-at-home order in September for Yangon, Ma Suu closed her stall and sold her clothes, plates and pots.
With nothing to sell, her husband, a jobless construction worker, has resorted to hunting for food in the open sewers of the slum where they live on the outskirts of Myanmar’s largest city.
“People eat rats and snakes,” Ma Suu said tearfully. “Without income, they need to eat like this to feed their children.”
They live in Hlaing Thar Yar, one of Yangon’s poorest neighborhoods, where locals shine flashlights in the undergrowth behind their homes, looking for a nocturnal creature to stave off their hunger.
While rats, reptiles, and insects are often eaten by families in rural areas, people in some urban areas are now reduced to feeding as best they can.
With more than 40,000 cases and 1,000 deaths, Myanmar faces one of the worst coronavirus outbreaks in Southeast Asia, and the lockdown in Yangon has left hundreds of thousands of people, like Ma Suu, out of work and without valuable support.
A man prepares dinner for his family in a slum in Yangon, Myanmar.
Local administrator Nay Min Tun said that in his part of Hlaing Thar Yar, 40% of households had received assistance, but many workplaces were closed and people became more desperate.
Myat Min Thu, the ruling party’s lawmaker for the region, said government aid and private donations were being distributed, but acknowledged that not everyone could be covered.
The crisis has cast a shadow over a general election slated for November 8, although Nobel Prize winner Aung San Suu Kyi is still expected to win by a comfortable margin.
NOTHING BUT THE MARKET
Even before the pandemic, a third of Myanmar’s 53 million people were considered “highly vulnerable” to poverty, despite recent progress following the country’s emergence after decades of ruinous isolation under the military junta.
Financial pressure now threatens to push many people back into poverty or reduce their chances of getting out.
Poverty in the developing East Asia and Pacific region is expected to increase for the first time in 20 years due to COVID-19, the World Bank said in September, with around 38 million people expected to increase. stay or be pushed back into poverty.
The Myanmar government has offered poor households a one-time food package and three cash grants of $ 15 each as part of its relief plan, but families say it is nowhere near enough.
A survey by ONow Myanmar of more than 2,000 people across the country in April found that 70% had stopped working and a quarter had taken out loans for food, medicine and other essentials.
Sectors fostering industrialization in Myanmar – including garment work and tourism – have come to a halt as remittances have dried up, said Gerard Mccarthy, postdoctoral researcher at the Asian Research Institute in Singapore.
“Households already heavily indebted due to payment for medical treatment, schooling, maintenance of the elderly and daily survival … many will have to repay these loans before they can start spending on anything. discretionary, ”he said.
Thant Myint-U, a historian from Myanmar, rebuked the lack of a proper social safety net and the collapse of traditional social protection systems in villages.
“For tens of millions of Myanmar’s poor, there is nothing but the market which, in good times, offers opportunities for informal work in cities or for migration abroad, but in good times. period of slowdown, the poorest have little more than the shirt on their backs. ,” he said.
(Except for the title, this story was not edited by GalacticGaming staff and is posted from a syndicated feed.)
