From correspondents in Sateek, India

March 18, 2008 12:03am
Article from: Reuters

ABOUT a million people in India's northeastern state of Mizoram are
facing famine after a plague of rats ate the region's entire paddy crop,
officials and aid agencies said overnight.

Hordes of rats have swept through the forests of Mizoram, home to just
under a million tribespeople, feasting on the fruits of wild bamboo,
which flowers every 48 years.

Experts say that the rich protein content of the bamboo fruits increases
the rats' reproductive power, and, when they finished off the fruits,
the rats turned their attention to farmers' crops.

The last time the bamboo flowered was in 1959 - and the armies of rats
that came in its wake decimated paddy fields across the region, leading
to severe food shortages.

In 2007, the Government hoped to be better prepared. But the rats could
not be stopped because of bad planning and alternative rice supply plans
went wrong, aid agencies said.

They said a majority of villagers were now surviving on wild roots, yam
and sweet potatoes with either no supply or no money to buy to their
staple food - rice.

"Conditions of widespread food shortage and hunger prevail in all eight
districts of Mizoram,'' a report by international aid agency Actionaid said.

"The Government is reluctant to accept that the situation is rapidly
slipping out of its control.''

Local people call the famine which follows bamboo flowering "mautum'',
which means "bamboo death'' in the local language. In 1959, New Delhi
brushed off local warnings of a famine as tribal superstition.

The last bamboo flowering gave birth to the Mizo National Famine Front,
an organisation set up to meet food shortages but which ended up
fighting the Indian government for independence.

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