Taw Lawi :Farmers in Thaton District, in southern Burma, claim that they will be unable to meet the total acres of land planned to be cultivated by the Burmese government they close of 2010, by a deficit of over 60 thousand acres.
In order to contribute to reaching the Burmese government’s goal of extending Burma’s rice cultivation to 16 million acres by the end of 2010, the Thaton agricultural authorities planned for 490 thousand acres of rice paddies to be created and actively cultivated by the close of the 2010 rainy season. According to an agricultural public service personnel member, only 430 thousand acres were planted with paddy seed by the first week of October.
Thaton District’s paddy fields include a large number of “deep paddy” cultivation fields, which struggle every year with flooding issues; many of the 60 thousand paddy acres that have not been planted are largely comprised of this type of paddy field, and cannot be cultivated at the present time. Farmers report that the 430,000 acres that have been planted are flourishing.
Uncultivated paddies were closed in August of this year, and considered past planting time. Yet Thaton Farmers report that when local agricultural authorities sent in the lists of stated-controlled rice paddy acres in to the Burmese government his October, the list included 60 thousand acres that had decidedly not been planted.
Sources explained that three factors contributed to the deficit: flooding in deep paddys, the difficulties of planting immature new paddies, and high costs.
“Planting after a flood, it is hard to grow seeds to get rice seedlings, the seeds perish and then this is not easy to transplant, on top of that there no money, especially if the rain ends after we plant these paddies. The fields will fail,” said a farmer at Naung Kalar village from Thaton township.
A member of the government’s inventory personal for Thaton District explained that a second major factor in the skewed numbers reported to the Burmese state by district agricultural authorities is that authorities counted recently created paddy fields in their tallies. Newly exposed, or created paddy fields cannot be cultivated immediately; despite this several acres of new fields in Kyaik Hto were included in the report compiled by Thaton agricultural authorities.
This personal member explained that according to the Burmese government’s plan, by the end of 2010 Mon State was set cultivate 1 million acres of rice, up from only 700 thousand acres in the year 2006. This year, the six townships in Moulmein district in Mon state were recorded as having cultivated 505,600 acres, and the 4 townships in Thaton district were recorded as having cultivated 490 thousand acres. On paper at least, Mon State has nearly reached the cultivation goal set for it by the Burmese government.
A third reason for the cultivation deficit is the large amount of extra money needed to cultivate some of the district’s field during this rainy season’s drought. A representative from the Naung Kalar village government institute of plantation sciences explained that many farmers were unwilling to cultivate the extra fields due to the amount of money they would have been required to spend on chemical fertilizers to boost production.
The representative from the Naung Kalar village institute reported that officially according to the Burmese government’s plan, of the four townships in Thaton District, 136 thousand acres of rice are being cultivated in Thaton township, 132 thousand acres in Paung township, 128 thousand acres in Belin township, and 34 thousand acres in Belin township, creating a projected total of 490 thousand acres; unfortunately, this number included the 60 thousand acres that, at least by October 10th of this year, are not being cultivated.
