Word: rice
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...people of the delta fend for themselves. Farming families dry their recently harvested rice on nets spread out on the Bogalay road, and hang their damp clothes on the dead power lines. In the Bogalay area, the harvest was almost complete when Nargis struck, although much of it now lies unhusked in cyclone-crippled rice mills...
Hundreds of thousands of Burmese are asking the same thing across the vast Irrawady delta, the country's rice bowl. Nationwide, the Burmese government estimates that more than 22,000 lost their lives. For the people who survived the cyclone's wrath, there is little time to grieve. Makeshift huts must be constructed, drinking water procured. And in at least five villages along the Irrawaddy, residents say that not a single government official has come to assess the damage or bring relief supplies nearly a week after the May 2-3 storm abated. Than Maw, who says some 400 people...
...short voyage from the battered delta town of Pyapon to Myint Swe's village of Myinkakon, where last weekend Cylone Nargis claimed a hundred lives and flattened most houses. Today, six days later, government aid has finally reached the village: officials gave each household about two kilos of rice - barely enough to feed a family for a day. Nearby villages have received nothing...
...villagers are perilously low on food. By sinking their boats and killing their buffalo, the disaster has robbed many villagers of their livelihood. Impoverished, they cannot afford to buy much food, especially with post-cyclone prices rising. They have a store of unhusked rice, which is damp and inedible, and many people now survive on coconuts blown down from the trees. Clean water is also scarce. Their well is now polluted with sea-water, so villagers take water from the river and boil it, or collect the rain flowing from the monastery's shattered tin roofs...
...scene of devastation has reached apocalyptic levels. Aerial photos of the Irrawaddy delta, Burma's rice bowl, show much of the region still inundated by a vast surge of muddy water. The few residents who have been able to communicate with the outside world describe rice fields littered with bodies and villages where not a single bamboo shack was left standing. Even in the commercial capital Rangoon, where structures are more sturdily constructed, roofs were sheared off buildings and nearly all the city's main streets were uprooted of their columns of stately trees. "We have a major humanitarian catastrophe...