Rats! They Eat Your Crops, You Eat Them in Turn

Rats! They eat your crops, you eat them in turn. Such seems to be the philosophy of the Bangladeshis, feeling beleaguered by an army of rodents.

The impoverished Chittagong Hill Tracts region of Bangladesh is facing an unprecedented food shortage, part of which is blamed on the rats that have migrated from across the borders.

The fields surrounding Theihkyong, a remote village in the CHT, has been laid waste by an invading army of rodents, which might have crossed over the nearby border with India three months ago.

Sangram, a rat catcher, is indeed a busy man these days. In fact it is more than a job for him. He says he 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," the grim-faced Sangram said.

"All we have left are the rats and these wild potatoes."

They live in a traditional one-room house - the roof is of thatched grass - the walls and floors weaved strands of bamboo. It sits on high stilts.

There is space underneath for a harvest of rice, maize and vegetables but this year it is empty.

Theihkyong is a poor village with two churches and a community school. But there is no clinic, no electricity, no running water or telephones.

The people here have to fend for themselves. They are proud of their independence and their identity as members of one of Bangladesh's tribal minorities, but when something bad happens, they have nothing to fall back on.

The rat traps that Sangram looks after are huge and ingenious. A long bamboo fence divides two fields but every so often Sangram has left open a booby-trapped entrance.

When the rat walks in, it triggers the trap, and a bamboo pole, weighted with soil, drops with a thump.

He walks along the fence throwing the squashed, light-brown rats into a basket he wears on his back.

At home they will be strung together and smoked over an open fire until they are black and hard.

Sangram also checks uninhabited houses that dot the fields. Inside are dozens of carefully concealed snares.

It is the villagers' revenge. They have turned their desolated hillsides into a rat minefield. They have caught thousands of them.

"We are in big trouble and want people to realise that," Theihkyong's priest Lal Jinja said.

The government and relief agencies are finally beginning to believe them and are waking up to the problem, which extends far beyond the boundaries of that single village.

According to the UN's development programme, about 125,000 people have been affected by food shortages and the rats, says Mark Dummett of the BBC.

Some have started to receive aid, but unless more arrives soon these people will be cut off from the outside world, without any food to eat for months.

That is because the monsoon is on its way. There are not many bridges and it will be impossible to ford the rivers once the rains come.

The starving communities sit in the hills along Bangladesh's south-eastern borders with India and Burma.

In the Chittagong Hill Tracts the indigenous Christian and Buddhist tribes complain of decades of mistreatment by the central authorities.

The only government institution that is decently funded is the army.

It says it needs a large presence to defend the region against a myriad of tribal rebel groups from India, Burma and Bangladesh itself. But locals say it sometimes acts like an occupying force.

The looming famine is proof of this neglect, as the crisis - and the rat invasion - were entirely predictable.

It happens to this region roughly every 50 years. That is how often the bamboo forests that cover the hillsides blossom.

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.

The last rat plague in 1959 caused devastation just over the border in the Indian state of Mizoram.

The people there suffered so much and were so appalled by the lack of help from the government, they launched a rebellion that lasted 20 years.

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 says that the rats then "were as big as pigs".

Source-Medindia
GPL/L

Rats! They Eat Your Crops, You Eat Them in Turn - Bangladeshis