Burmese Language
Food aid cut to Thailand refugee camps
Events have conspired to create a shortfall in funding for a prominent Thailand border aid group, meaning that food supplies to Burmese refugees in camps along the border is to be reduced.
A doubling in price of yellow bean, a critical foodstuff in camps along the Thai-Burma border that house some 140,000 refugees, means that from August this year the supply will be cut. The Thailand Burma Border Consortium (TBBC) says that it hopes the measure will only be temporary, but the group is facing a US$2.5 million shortfall in funding for this year.
“It’s largely down the change in exchange rate [that has caused the price-rise], but while some donors have increased our funding, others have reduced it,” said Sally Thompson, deputy director of TBBC.
The absence of yellow bean, one of the three main foodstuffs in the camps, will reduce daily energy content to just below 2000 kilocalories, Thompson said, adding that the figure was “still within the maintenance level for the population”.
“In the short-term we do not expect to see a deterioration in the health of the refugees, but we will monitor this through various health agencies.”
Refugees continue to arrive in the camps on an almost daily basis, the majority from Karen state in eastern Burma where the opposition Karen National Liberation Army (KNLA) has been fighting a 60-year war against the Burmese military government.
Thompson said that “it is essential that Thai authorities allow these people to seek asylum on Thai soil”, and that TBBC would look for ways to maintain donor interest in the refugee situation “because it is likely to be ongoing”.
But a man called Jipsy, who lives in the Mae La camp in Thailand’s Tha Song Yan district, said that the cut in food aid “will be difficult for the refugees who don’t have jobs”.
“Here, when you are given flour, then flour is your only food – the same thing applies to beans, whether some like eating it or not. So if [food] is no longer given, then it will be difficult for some people,” he said.
It mirrors a similar situation during the world food crisis in 2007 when TBBC, which has been active on the Thai-Burma border in various forms since 1984, was forced to cut supplies to camps. This year’s food rationing will begin in August but implementation will be staggered across the camps, Thompson said.
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While our people both inside and outside on the border areas in Thailand are starving, the foolish and merciless junta is wasting the nation’s assets on its own imagined security, power and wealth. Shame on us.
Come election, these thieves, robbers and killers must be removed by non-recognition of the election result – for the result is already known – by the international community, China included.
Is that a far-fetched idea?
To make if practical, there should be no veto powers in the UN, or else limited to their own national affairs, not on others.
While this shortfall in funding is an unfortunate reality for the refugees in the Thai border camps, the refugees have suffered worse deprivations many times in their lives, and they will make do with what they have.
With the help of the international community, donations to the Thailand Burma Border Consortium will increase to take up the slack.
Meanwhile, in IDP camps across the border, and in countless clusters of displaced villagers hiding deep in the jungle from the SPDC shock-troops, hundreds of thousands suffer terrible hardships in finding shelter, food, and medical treatments for disease and injury.
Often forced to flee with their children and whatever they can carry, donations which can help supply them with pots to cook rice, plastic jugs for water, clothing, a machete, a lighter, or plastic sheeting for roofing will save their lives.
Your donations to organizations such as Partners World, Free Burma Rangers, and other “backpack medics” will directly help thousands to receive aid, medicine, and medical treatment which will save the lives of men, women, and children who are at great risk, struggling to survive one day at a time.
A 2007 UNICEF report said that between 100,000, and 150,000 ethnic minority children die each year in Burma before reaching five years of age.
Among those who died may have been a future Aung San Suu Kyi, Mahatma Gandhi, Mother Teresa, or Nelson Mandella.
Or, perhaps a future Karen Saint.
For the Christians reading this comment, remember when King Harod sent his soldiers to Bethlehem to kill all of the infants under age 2 in order to preemptively snuff-out the life of the Christ?
Evil, human bondage, and persecution of Biblical proportions are crushing Good, freedom, and democracy in Burma.
Lies are crushing truth.
The machines of SPDC greed, revenge, and corruption are greased with the blood, sweat and tears of Burmese ethnic minority citizens who have been tagged by the SPDC regime for lifelong torture, rape, forced labour, and persecution.
The people are left to starve as their confiscated ricefields are converted to palm oil, castor bean oil, and rubber plantations, to be worked by forced labourers.
All in the name of the SPDC regime’s chosen religion, the unholy trinity of Greed, Revenge, and Power.
Please, donate generously, and donate often in order to save innocent lives.