Seven hundred bags of fertilizer sent to help farmers whose paddy fields were ruined by saltwater flooding were destroyed when a storage building collapsed into a river in Rathedaung Township, Arakan state on 13th December.
The fertilizer bags, which had been sent by the state prime minister arrived in Rathedaung from Sittway Township on the evening of 12th December, but they were not sent to an Agricultural Department storage facility. Instead, they were temporarily stored at the No. 10 Special Bridge Construction Project next to Rathedaung Port in a storage building that collapsed causing all the bags to be lost in the river according to a government official.
He said: “The township administrator’s main concern was the expense of transporting the fertilizer to agricultural storage, so he ordered that they be kept in temporary storage. It would also be easier for farmers from rural areas to come and collect it. But because the storage building was not strong it collapsed in the early morning at 3am and all the 700 bags of fertilizer were lost.”
He added that a few useable bags of fertilizer, not more than 50, were salvaged from the accident.
Local residents speculated that officials might have wanted to keep the costs of transporting the fertilizer to agricultural storage for themselves, which was why they chose to store the fertilizer in an unsuitable building that collapsed and caused the fertilizer to be lost.
The Arakan State Prime Minister has sent out 1,000 fertilizer bags to farmers affected by saltwater flooding. The 700 lost bags of fertilizer were valued at 14 million kyats.
The No. 10 Special Bridge Construction Project also lost 350 bags of stone powder worth 2.5 million kyats when the storage building collapsed.
Translated by Aung Myat Soe English version written by Mark Inkey for BNI
