Join them? I fled Burma, just like many Burmese I know. I was actually supporting a family in Yangon, but my livelihood, like so many other people I knew there, got wiped out, and I had to start over.

It’s the poor Burmese who cannot leave the country and who will probably be stuck there for the next 20 years with an oppressive government and economic sanctions that stifle their economy that I really feel for, and with the collapse of the US financial sector in the last week, I can’t see how things are going to get better.

I refuse to worship at the Church of Aung San Suu Kyi because that is all the western media talks about when they deign to look at the country for a split fraction of a second. The fact is there are 50 million people suffering in that country and Aung Suu Kyi is only one of them, and they suffer because their country is the economic hermit kingdom, made even worse by economic sanctions.

A guy on the street pulled down his baso and showed me the stitches from having his appendix removed, once. Why? He was begging to exchange his worthless kyat for US dollars so he could buy some crappy medicine so he couldn’t die.

To butt your head stubbornly against the wall for 20 years with the same failed strategy, the opposition strategy, is truly: a broken record, stuck in a rut.

Moe Aung you’re displaying the same true believer behavioural characteristics here that, for instance, puts Georgetown political scientist on a black list of enemies because he suggests alternatives, which is exactly his job as a political scientist.

“If Sharp serves the purpose, a means to an end, it certainly is a valuable asset. Both Sinn Fein and the Mahatma inspired the Burmese independence movement. All options should be considered.”

And the one most obvious option is to withdraw economic sanctions.

Sharp is just a minor variation on the last 20 years of going absolutely nowhere.

Hla Oo, do you have a source that you can provide for your assertion Burma lags just a bit behind Thailand? I think there are several countries that would better qualify for that position.

Forced labor and military checkpoints situations are directly related to the outgoing civil war, and for the conflict’s various participants it is almost totally impossible to get rid of as long as the war is going on in that war-torn areas.

I used to work as an Irrigation Engineer for the Ministry of Agriculture and, even though the ministers and various heads of departments are the army or ex-army officers, the ministry is run by the professionals as in any other countries. Agricultural extensions offices are in every townships and Burma has a specialized agricultural university and agricultural research institute.

When it comes to tactical reforms in Burma, Burmese agronomists know better than anyone else. Where I come from some farmers even have crops growing in every season. Paddy in the rainy season, jute in the summer, gluttonous rice in the winter. All thanks to the efforts and supports of these well-learned government agronomists.

My point is the strategic agricultural reform of the redistribution of agricultural land has already been completed since 40 years ago in Burma and the result is the food-self-sufficiency and the ample export of excess produce to neighboring countries.

Once the sanctions are removed Burmese farmers will be able to send the rice and other agricultural produce exports to the west like seemingly democratic Thais and still Communist Vietnamese are doing now.

Burma used to be the biggest exporter of rice and now, even with all the current troubles and a nasty civil war she is just lagging a bit just behind Thailand the current biggest rice exporter on this planet.

First, the land tenure situation isn’t as straightforward as you seem to think, Hla Oo. While it is true that practically speaking in day to day affairs the land is in the hands of the farmers, as Stephen has noted in another discussion, the state still technically owns the land. Add to this a clear pattern of confiscation of land without compensation by the military, and you have a situation where the farmers are always looking over their shoulders with uncertainty, which is not conducive to agricultural production. Furthermore, virtually all the villages I worked with had been forcibly relocated, in some instances multiple times, due to the military’s “Four Cuts” campaigns. In one instance villagers had spend an entire day walking to their agricultural fields from the area they had been relocated. Needless to say, this had severe negative impacts on their agricultural production. So the issue isn’t whether land tenure is communalized or privatized, but that land tenure is always uncertain and at the mercy of the military’s agrarian agenda.

I think Stephen also is correct in the basic reforms he thinks are needed for a start, although I would point out that in fairness to the military regime, they are not the only group to demand forced labor from the populace. In the Shan State various ceasefire groups have also adopted the practice.

I would also point out that point out that technical reforms like crop loans and providing resources like fertilizer are far from easy tasks. I can tell you direct personal experience that fertilizer procurement can be a major undertaking. While proposing how exactly these technical reforms should be carried out is far beyond my expertise, they are absolutely critical. Stephen’s #3 would be a good starting point to address this problem, but I doubt we’ll see the regime take such action any time soon.

Finally, I would say that any reforms would have to take in to account potential negative impacts on women. The political and economic upheavals in Burma have had a particularly negative effect on women, who additionally have traditional roles and societal expectations, which may have protected them in the context of traditional societies, but in the current context work against them.

I think you’ve raised the key issue, Hla Oo. Ideally, agricultural policy would be set by the country’s predominantly small-scale farmers themselves. Actually, the monthly Township Peace and Development Council meetings that the SPDC currently has in place could provide a venue for such local input into agricultural policy, but because of the SPDC’s authoritarian proclivities, agricultural policy has become a top-down process, set at the national level, with no account for local environmental, climatic and other difference, and is furthermore set and enforced by military personnel, not agronomists. For example, Burma’s Minister of Agriculture and Irrigation is Maj-Gen Htay Oo, current head of the USDA. Agricultural policy is thus subservient to military policy and as I’ve quoted before, agricultural analysts Koichi Fujita and Ikuko Okamoto who have done extensive fiend work in Burma, identify the SPDC’s agricultural policy objectives as, “avoidance of social unrest and sustenance of the regime”.

But anyway here are some initial suggestions,

1. Stop forced labour. As forced labour is now so pervasive, at least in rural Karen State, it significantly cuts into time needed for agricultural work leading to reduced or wholly failed paddy harvests.
2. Eliminate roadway military checkpoints and tollbooths. Excessive road tolls have made small-scale agricultural trade in many cases unprofitable.
3. Allow farmers to set their own agricultural agenda. The whole kyet-su castor bean fiasco is just one example of the failures of authoritarian agricultural governance.

Economist Sean Turnell likewise reports that SPDC officials dictate to local farmers “what, how and how much to produce”. Despite the reports that the SPDC eliminated the paddy procurement quota in 2003, many farmers in Burma report that the practice continues. When Burma’s inflation reached 35% last year the IMF, likewise recommended “liberalizing agriculture to give farmers more freedom to grow and sell their crops.” Anyways, these are just some initial thoughts.

From a Burmese point of view the strategic agricultural reform is either the total redistribution of large tracts of land owned by absentee landlords like they are trying to do it in Philippines and Latin American countries, or the complete dismantling of Agricultural Communes like they successfully did in China and the countries of former Soviet Union.

In case of Burma the communes never exist even though the land is nominally owned by the state aka the army. The wholesale redistribution of large tracts of agricultural land owned by the absentee landlords, the legacy of colonial times, was started in the fifties by the Communist rebellion and later completed by the Ne Win’s Socialist Government.

Since all the agricultural land is basically in the hands of farmers now, my question to our learned Americans, Aiontay and/or Stephen, is what sort of further strategic reform Burma still need except for the technical reforms of providing crop loans and other resources like fertilizers?