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Permalink Reply by Michelle Dinger on May 6, 2008 at 11:02am

Now they count for over 22,500 deaths and a further 41,000 missing. Also, food prices are going up rapidly since a lot of the food supplies got destroyed when the cyclone hit. "There's not much food," said one woman standing by a stall of pineapples. "The price of a cabbage is now 1,000 kyats, instead of 250." (Reuters)

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Permalink Reply by Tim Michaels on May 6, 2008 at 4:06pm

It truly is a tragedy of an incredible magnitude. My prayers are with them all. It seems that getting any significant aid into the region is going to be tough though with the military rulers not being exactly very cooperative.

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Permalink Reply by Erle Frayne Argonza on May 10, 2008 at 9:19am

It's tough tacticizing how to donate relief to a relatively closed society in times of calamities. Even the UN had recently given up on relief, perhaps temporarily. The praetorians would want to ensure their own control over food there now, like the North Korean's praetorian control of food stocks during the famine era recently. If there are some ways to get straight to NGOs and monastic groups there, this may be an appreciable start.

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Permalink Reply by Erle Frayne Argonza on May 18, 2008 at 5:04am

Recently the toll climbed up 100,000+. This is now a very major disaster, without doubt this will go down in history as among the century's worst. Hair raising! Bad PR for the praetorian state to cling to the political campaign (for democratization) at a time of this nightmarish tragedy, really bad. The only good thing I can see from this event is that, after all's settled, it will fast track the construction of the $100-Billion Mekong River project which has many components. i just hope that the reconstitution of damaged mangroves, such as those ones in the Irrawady, will be integrated into this gigantic endeavor, thus eventually controlling those calamitous floods and cyclone impacts.

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