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YANGON (Reuters) – After the first wave of coronavirus hit Myanmar in March, 36-year-old Ma Suu closed her salad stand and pawned her jewelry and gold to buy food.
During the second wave, when the government issued a stay-at-home order in September for Yangon, Ma Suu closed her stall again and sold her clothes, dishes and pots.
With nothing to sell, her husband, a jobless construction worker, has resorted to foraging for food in the open drains next to the slum where they live on the outskirts of Myanmar’s largest city.
“People are eating rats and snakes,” Ma Suu said through tears. “With no income, they need to eat like this to feed their children.”
They live in Hlaing Thar Yar, one of Yangon’s poorest neighborhoods, where residents light lanterns in the undergrowth behind their houses, looking for some nocturnal creature to stave off their hunger.
While families in rural areas often eat rats, reptiles, and insects, people in some urban areas are now reduced to receiving as much nutrition as possible.
With more than 40,000 cases and 1,000 deaths, Myanmar is facing one of the worst coronavirus outbreaks in Southeast Asia, and the closure in Yangon has left hundreds of thousands of people, like Ma Suu, out of work and with very little support. .
Local administrator Nay Min Tun said that in his part of Hlaing Thar Yar 40% of households had received help, but many workplaces were closed and people had become more desperate.
Myat Min Thu, the ruling party lawmaker for the area, said government aid and private donations were being distributed, but acknowledged that not everyone could be covered.
The crisis has overshadowed the general elections scheduled for November 8, although Nobel laureate Aung San Suu Kyi is still expected to win by a comfortable margin.
NOTHING BUT THE MARKET
Even before the pandemic, a third of Myanmar’s 53 million people were considered “highly vulnerable” to poverty, despite recent advances following the country’s emergence from decades of ruinous isolation under the military junta.
The financial contraction now threatens to plunge many back into poverty or reduce their chances of getting out.
Poverty in the developing East Asia and Pacific region will increase for the first time in 20 years due to COVID-19, the World Bank said in September, with about 38 million expected to remain or fall back into poverty.
The Myanmar government has offered poor households a one-time food package and three cash grants of $ 15 each as part of its relief plan, but families say it falls short.
An ONow Myanmar survey of more than 2,000 people across the country in April found that 70% had stopped working and a quarter had applied for loans for food, medicine and other essential items.
Sectors driving industrialization in Myanmar, including garment work and tourism, have come to a standstill as remittances have dried up, said Gerard McCarthy, a postdoctoral fellow at the Asia Research Institute in Singapore.
“Households that are already in debt for payment for medical treatment, education, elderly support and day-to-day survival … many will have to pay off these loans before they can start spending on something discretionary,” he said.
Thant Myint-U, a Myanmar historian, lamented the absence of an adequate social safety net and the collapse of traditional village welfare systems.
“For tens of millions of Myanmar’s poor, there is nothing but the market, which in good times offers opportunities for informal work in cities or migration abroad, but during a recession it leaves the poorest with little more. That shirt on the back, “he said.
(Reporting by Shoon Naing. Additional reporting and editing by Poppy McPherson and Simon Cameron-Moore)
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