Bangladesh: Rats Destroy Harvest
An infestation of rats is creating severe food shortages in the impoverished Chittagong Hill Tracts region of Bangladesh.
Dorcas, together with its implementing partner Koinonia, will assist 10,000 of the victims from May to August as an initial response to the crisis.
According to the UN, about 125,000 people are suffering from food insecurity.
The people hit are poor indigenous Christian and Buddhist tribes living in the mountains close to the borders of India and Burma.
The bamboo flowers roughly once every 50 years and their seeds are high in protein and, when the rats eat them, they breed four times faster than normal. After their numbers swell and they finish eating the bamboo seeds, they move into people's fields and eat their crops. 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 Burma as well.
A rat catcher in the remote village of Theihkyong, has never been busier and nor has his work been as important as it is now. He 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," he said.
- "All we have left are the rats and wild potatoes."
The last rat plague in 1959 caused devastation just over the border in the Indian state of Mizoram. 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 me that the rats then "were as big as pigs". (Sources: DAI's partner Koinonia, BBC)
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