25 million in Myanmar could live in poverty next year: UN report

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25 million in Myanmar could live in poverty next year: UN report

Nadia Murray-Ragg | Victoria U. Wellington Faculty of Law, NZ

May 3, 2021 04:52:14 pm

25 million persons in Myanmar, half of the country’s population, could be living in poverty next year following the devastating impacts of COVID-19 and the military coup d’état, according to a new report from the UN Friday.

The report, entitled “COVID-19, Coup d’Etat and Poverty: Compounding Negative Shocks and Their Impact on Human Development in Myanmar,” found that the improvements Myanmar had made in reducing poverty in the 12 years between 2005 and 2017 are at risk of being eroded by the recent challenges plaguing the country. During those 12 years, Myanmar halved its poverty statistics. Despite this improvement, the report found that a third of the Myanmar population was vulnerable, considered “near poor” in 2017, and likely to be significantly affected by unexpected events.

“Given a weak social protection system, and heavy reliance on precarious household earnings, a significant part of the population remained susceptible to sliding below the poverty line in the event of an exogenous shock,” the report noted.

These exogenous shocks were realized with COVID-19 and the military coup. Largely owing to restrictions imposed in light of COVID-19, 83 percent of Myanmar households said they had experienced reduced income of late. Non-farm household businesses were most affected. The farming season was largely completed when COVID-19 broke out in the country.

Poverty rates were found to have increased by between six and 11 percent following the breakout of COVID-19 last year. The military coup which began in February of this year was found to have exacerbated the impact COVID-19 had already made.

The report also found that households headed by women were most likely to have a negative impact from COVID-19 and the military coup. It called this the “feminization of poverty.” It found the factors triggering this effect were the “types and sectors of female employment in Myanmar” and the “disproportionate burden of unpaid domestic work imposed on women, which in many instances has forced them to leave their jobs.”

“Without functioning democratic institutions, Myanmar faces a tragic and avoidable backslide towards levels of poverty not seen in a generation,” said the Administrator of the UN Development Program, Achim Steiner.

Work is underway to end the military junta. A parallel national unity government formed earlier this year. It is composed of the members of the democratically-elected government that was overthrown by the military and is actively seeking recognition of its legitimacy.

Martin Luther King Jr. wrote his Letter from Birmingham Jail

On April 16, 1963, an incarcerated Martin Luther King, Jr. (arrested for demonstrating in defiance of a court order) wrote his Letter from Birmingham Jail in response to a published statement by eight fellow clergymen from Alabama.

Part of the letter read: We have waited for more than 340 years for our constitutional and God-given rights. The nations of Asia and Africa are moving with jetlike speed toward gaining political independence, but we stiff creep at horse-and-buggy pace toward gaining a cup of coffee at a lunch counter. Perhaps it is easy for those who have never felt the stinging dark of segregation to say, "Wait." But when you have seen vicious mobs lynch your mothers and fathers at will and drown your sisters and brothers at whim; when you have seen hate-filled policemen curse, kick and even kill your black brothers and sisters; when you see the vast majority of your twenty million Negro brothers smothering in an airtight cage of poverty in the midst of an affluent society; when you suddenly find your tongue twisted and your speech stammering as you seek to explain to your six-year-old daughter why she can't go to the public amusement park that has just been advertised on television, and see tears welling up in her eyes when she is told that Funtown is closed to colored children, and see ominous clouds of inferiority beginning to form in her little mental sky, and see her beginning to distort her personality by developing an unconscious bitterness toward white people; when you have to concoct an answer for a five-year-old son who is asking: "Daddy, why do white people treat colored people so mean?"; when you take a cross-county drive and find it necessary to sleep night after night in the uncomfortable corners of your automobile because no motel will accept you; when you are humiliated day in and day out by nagging signs reading "white" and "colored"; when your first name becomes "nigger," your middle name becomes "boy" (however old you are) and your last name becomes "John," and your wife and mother are never given the respected title "Mrs."; when you are harried by day and haunted by night by the fact that you are a Negro, living constantly at tiptoe stance, never quite knowing what to expect next, and are plagued with inner fears and outer resentments; when you are forever fighting a degenerating sense of "nobodiness" then you will understand why we find it difficult to wait. There comes a time when the cup of endurance runs over, and men are no longer willing to be plunged into the abyss of despair. I hope, sirs, you can understand our legitimate and unavoidable impatience. Read the full text of the Letter.