Mahtab Haider

IN THE Bandarban district of the Chittagong Hill Tracts they are calling it an indur banya because little else can better describe what they have witnessed. Since October 2007, literally hundreds of thousands of rats have swarmed into the villages in the remote hills of Bandarban and Rangamati along Bangladesh’s forested southeastern border, devouring everything in their path – crops, tubers and fruits – and leaving a trail of devastation and famine in their wake. In Thykieong Para in Bandarban, Sawmkhawp Bawm, the karbari or headman, says that for weeks on end they and the neighbouring paras killed over a thousand rats a night but the swarms have grown no smaller.

‘First they ate all the crops in our jhum [fields] and then they started eating the vegetables and wild potato, leaving nothing for us to bring home to our families.’ The families in Sawmkhawp’s village, and those along the Bangladesh border with India’s Mizoram state are now not only faced with a famine in the coming months; worse still, they have little or no seeds to plant the next crop. ‘And its not as if the rats are dead, we are still killing dozens every night. The only reason the numbers are down is because there is nothing left to eat in our fields – but they will be back when we plant again,’ says Sawmkhawp.

Across the border in Mizoram, the situation is just as dire, if not worse. Reports in local papers reveal that by the end of last year, the rats had already destroyed nearly 48 per cent of the state’s paddy production.

The key to this exponential growth in the rat population is ordained in the local folklore of the CHT hills. When the bamboo plants bear flowers, it augurs a famine or natural calamity, say locals. It has emerged in the past decades that the bamboo, like other grasses flowers once in its lifetime, and then dies. This occurs every 50-60 years, and when the ubiquitous bamboo bears its protein-rich flowers, rat numbers multiply because of the abundance of food. While rats will reproduce about twice a year on normal years with the flowering of the bamboo, they might reproduce between 6-8 times in one year. When the rodents exhaust their food supply in the forest, they descend into the areas inhabited by humans and start consuming their crops, their vegetables, and literally everything else that fall in their way. The mystery is in the fact that bamboo forests across hundreds of square kilometres start flowering all at the same time, triggering famines of unimaginable scale.

But, as little understood or reported as it may be, this phenomenon is by no means new. Thangbawii, aged 96, lives in India’s Mizoram state, and remembers the last time the bamboo flowered. The year was 1958-1959 and the resultant famine killed between 10,000-15,000 people. State government reports in Mizoram suggest that 51.38 per cent (1,254,400 ha) of its forest area is covered with bamboo. ‘When famine hit us, everyone, except children and elders, migrated. We walked for three days and two nights, taking shelter in houses not known to us,’ she told the Delhi-based Down to Earth magazine last year.

Thangbawii and those that survived had to work as tenant farmers on other people’s land and carry what rice they earned back to their villages. The recorded flowerings of 1862 and 1911 had also caused devastating famines in Mizoram. The 1958 famine, and the Indian government’s neglect of it, prompted an armed revolt and the rise of the Mizo Famine Front, which later renamed itself the Mizo National Front – one of several separatist groups in India’s troubled north-east. Records of the omen that the bamboo flower carries, however, date back to the 500 BC Sanskrit epic, the Mahabharata.

The tragedy in the Bangladesh hill tracts will gradually unfold in the coming months, however. While local government authorities had woken up to the severity of the coming disaster late last year, the power centres in Dhaka had found it absurd folktales when they were told that the flowering of the bamboo would lead to severe food shortages. Professor Thanjama Lusai, who is the chairman of the Bandarban Hill District Council, brought the issue of the coming famine to the attention of the military-controlled interim government’s cabinet as early as October last year. The government made no attempt to provide for rat-poison, or traps, suggesting only that the government could dip into its disaster relief fund in the event of a famine.

As of now, very little information about the scale of the damage is yet to filter through to Dhaka. Some of the national dailies have reported the humanitarian crisis, given the novelty of its origin, but developments since have been ignored. According to conservative estimates by the UNDP, which runs several programmes in the affected areas, at least 20,000-25,000 families are now confronted with a coming famine, in areas so remote that a needs assessment may take months and lead to hundreds, if not thousands, displaced or dead.

One of the biggest problems that the rural economies in the hill districts are currently faced with is that they are not essentially money economies and thus have little or no savings in cash that they can fall back on. While the shortage of rice – or any other staple – is significant, it is difficult to ignore the fact that most jhumias have also lost their seeds for the next harvest, says Biplob Chakma, who is based in the UNDP’s Rangamati office. The price of rice in these areas has already risen to levels much higher than in Dhaka, says Biplob, and the lack of their own produce to sell is preventing affected communities from being able to purchase other necessities such as shrimp paste, which is their primary source of protein and is used to cook most vegetables. Biplob also points out that providing seed paddy for the next harvest in the hills will also be a slow process as the strains cultivated in the region are different from those used in the plains, and much effort will have to go into determining the right kind of seed to distribute. What makes the intervention all the more challenging is that the communities worst affected are also those that are most remotely located, with no metalled or even brick roads through which aid can be delivered.

If the traditional neglect that the hill districts of Chittagong have been subjected to in national development strategies of the past decades comes to characterise the government’s response to the unravelling crisis, too little will be done too late. The government and the donors must do everything they can in not only bringing this humanitarian disaster to the fore, but also in responding with meaningful interventions that might prevent thousands of needless deaths.

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