The Idling Elephant Malaise

"Modern Burmese history was built on teak, which is to say it was built on the backs of elephants. The British quickly saw teak’s potential after colonizing Burma in 1824, and realized that hitching an elephant to a two-ton log was the only way of getting timber from where it was felled to the nearest waterway, and floating it to mill and market."
"Last year, in the land that is now officially known as Myanmar, total timber exports surpassed 1.24 million cubic tons and generated more than $1 billion in revenue, of which teak alone earned $359 million. From Tuesday [March 31, 2014], however, the new quasi-democratic government is banning the export of round logs and slashing its total logging quotas. The plan is to stimulate a domestic milling and carpentry industry and protect already plundered forest, which plummeted from 58% of total land in 1990 to 47% in 2010, according to government figures."
Time Magazine

An elephant pulls a teak log in a logging camp in Pinlebu township, Sagaing, northern Burma, in this picture taken March 6, 2014  Time magazine

Beasts of burden, they are called, strong animals that were trained by men to do tasks that men could not do with the relative ease of these animals. Before the invention of the motor vehicle, horses were used for transport. I am myself old enough to remember as a child horse-drawn wagons rumbling down the street I lived on, with cold, dripping blocks of ice hawked to housewives to put in their iceboxes, before refrigerators were common household appliances.

I remember as a child the thrill of excited disbelief when we children heard that there had been a dreadful accident between a motorcar and a horse. Eventually there was no more work for horses, and they were metaphorically 'put out to pasture'. With mechanization reliance on dray animals, such as farm-working draught horses, the emergence of steam-driven tractors made the animals completely redundant. Small ponies were once used in mines to pull wagonloads of coal.

All that changed with automation and mechanization. In Myanmar, the government, taking stock of its diminishing forests due to overlogging in reflection of how important the export of exotic wood was to the country's economy, decided it had to better regulate its natural resource of wood products. And that has resulted in elephants in their thousands, no longer required to exert their enormous strength in extracting felled timber from forests.

"They become angry a lot more easily", explained U Chit Sein, the possessor of eight logging elephants. "There is no work, so they are getting fat. And all the males want to do is have sex all the time", he explained of his working elephants accustomed to hard work now no longer working more than a few days a month. Just as human beings become bored, so do animals. Just as human beings require a sense of purpose, so do animals, to give structure and meaning to their lives.

Mahouts rode their elephants back to their camp in the jungle near Wa Kalu Pu. Credit Adam Dean for The New York Times

"Unemployment is really hard to handle. There is no logging because there are no more trees", observed U Saw Tha Pyae, whose own six working elephants have been without work for two years. Daw Khyne U Mar, the country's leading elephant expert, speaks of 2,500 elephants now without work. "Most of these elephants don't know what to do. The owners have a great burden. It's expensive to keep them."

Mature elephants, weighing in the neighbourhood of 4,500 kilograms must consume 180 kg of food daily. There are options for some elephants aside from hauling logs; some are employed in circuses, but those opportunities are limited. A 2008 study concluded that Myanmar's logging elephants live much longer than elephants kept in zoos in Europe; the working elephants living approximately 42 years rather than the 19 years' longevity for their zoo counterparts.

"You see working elephants living into their 50s and 60s quite regularly. It all comes down to nutrition and proper care", advised Joshua Plotnik, a Thailand-based elephant behaviour specialist. "I don't want to anthropomorphize, but if you take away that part of their life that has entertained them or stretched them mentally and physically -- it's difficult", explained John Edward Roberts, director of elephants and conservation activities at an elephant rescue centre in Thailand, the Golden Triangle Asian Elephant Foundation.

Some Burmese elephant owners have parted with their elephants out of necessity, selling them to Thai businessmen. There they will be used in the tourism industry, in elephant shows and on jungle treks popular with tourists. This does not necessarily reflect all working elephant owners' decisions on how to solve their dilemma of no work for their elephants. "I don't know what I will do with my elephants", Saw Tha Pyae worried of the beasts he had inherited from his parents.

"But I will never sell them, never! I love them so much!"

Adam Dean for The New York Times

The Slave Trade in Seafood

"You Burmese are never going home. You were sold, and no one is ever coming to rescue you."
Thai fishing boat captain

"I don’t want to speak that language anymore because I suffered so much there. I hate that language now."
"I feel like a tourist [on his return to his home in Burma]. I feel Indonesian."
"I didn’t want an Indonesian wife, I just wanted to go back home to Myanmar. I felt like I lost my young man’s life. I just thought that all of this time, I should have been in Burma having a wife and a proper family."
"My life was just so bad that it hurts me a lot to think about it. I miss my mom."
Myint Naing, 40, former fisherman slave

In this May 16, 2015, photo, former slave fisherman Myint Naing, 40, center, and his sister Mawli Than, left, embrace as they are reunited after 22 years at their village in Mon State, Myanmar. He is the oldest of four boys and two girls. In 1990, his father drowned while fishing, leaving him as the man in charge at just 15.   AP Photo/Gemunu Amarasinghe

Thailand has a busy and vast seafood export industry. And it is an industry built on slavery. Where innocent Burmese anxious to find employment are assured by recruiters that in Thailand they will find full employment, earn good salaries and be able to send money back home to their impoverished families living in their Burmese villages. The reality is that they are transported to Thailand and from there handed over for payment to fish in an industry that works its slaves around the clock, sometimes giving them a pittance in recompense, sometimes nothing.

Myint Naing, at the age of 18 became one of those slaves when a broker came to southern Myanmar in 1993 promising excellent, well-paid jobs for young men willing to work. Mying's father had died three years earlier and he, as the oldest male child in the family took on the mantle head of family and wage-earner. Desperate for a living wage for the family, Myint's mother agreed he could go with the agent. He was shipped by sea to the remote Indonesian island of Tual in the midst of rich fishing grounds.

And that was when the captain of the Thai vessel informed all the young men on board that they were no longer independent, but rather that he owned them; that they had been sold to him and there was no way they could return home. The ocean became his life as he became a slave to fishing to profit the captain and the larger, wider Thai fishing enterprise in their growing export market. It is a seafood business operating on the labour of an estimated 200,000 migrant workers.

Dita Alangkara/ Associated Press   Workers in Benjina, Indonesia, load fish onto a cargo ship bound for Thailand. Seafood caught by slaves mixes in with other fish at a number of sites in Thailand, including processing plants.

Many of them are not simply 'migrant workers', but slaves who were forced onto the boats; tricked, kidnapped or sold as Myint Naing had been. Their plight similar to that of press gangs roaming the streets of 18th Century Britain for sailors when such abductions were a common occurrence. The fishing companies that make up the Thai market have a wide consumer base, from the United States to Europe and Japan. The fish these workers and slaves help catch supplies food for faroff countries unware that slave labour places fish on their dining tables or in the tins of catfood they rely upon.

The young man repeatedly begged to be allowed to return home, and for his efforts was beaten mercilessly, forced to continue working on a boat in Indonesia. Eight years after he had first been taken to the boat as a slave he begged for his freedom only to hear the captain threaten to kill him. He was chained for three days as punishment, food and water denied him. He and 800 other slaves were rescued following a yearlong Associated Press investigation into Southeast Asia's fishing industry.

AP Photo/APTN In this Thursday, Nov. 27, 2014 image from video, workers from Myanmar load fish onto a Thai-flagged cargo ship in Benjina, Indonesia. An intricate web of connections separates the fish we eat from the men who catch it, and obscures a brutal truth: Our seafood may come from slave workers.

With the expansion of the seafood export industry, overfishing has meant that trawlers were required to sail further and further into foreign waters for fish. The result is that the workers are virtually trapped for months, extending to years aboard their seabound prisons. There is no medical care, boiled sea water is given them, and the rescued fishermen explained that on some boats workers were killed if they slowed the frenzied pace of drawing fish from the ocean. Some, in desperation, fling themselves into the sea.

In 1996, he ran away after having been beaten yet again in response to his pleading to be released. He managed to abandon his captivity, his skull wounded from the beating. An Indonesian family sheltered him until he regained some semblance of health, offering him food and shelter in return for his work on their farm. He stayed with them for five years, yearning to return to Myanmar, and missing the friends he had made and left behind on the boat he had run away from.

Then in 2001, a captain offering to take fishermen back home if they agreed to work caught his attention. In the hope that this would solve his dilemma he returned to the sea, discovering the conditions similar to what he had fled from. The elusive payment for their labour was withheld. After another nine months the captain abandoned them, leaving them free to return to Thailand on their own. When, once again, he asked to be returned to Burma, he was chained to the boat.

He managed to pick the lock on his shackles, dove into the night-time water and swam to shore. He hid in the jungle, fearful of approaching police lest they deliver him back to the fishing captains. By 2011 his life of solitude and privation caused him to move to the island of Dobo and there he heard of a small group of former Burmese slaves, living on vegetables they raised themselves. A friend informed him eventually that the Indonesian government had begun a rescue operation, embarrassed by revelations of slavery.

In this May 16, 2015 photo, former slave fisherman Myint Naing and his mother, Khin Than, cry as they are reunited after 22 years at their village in Mon State, Myanmar. Myint, 40, is among hundreds of former slave fishermen who returned to Myanmar following an Associated Press investigation into the use of forced labor in Southeast Asia’s seafood industry.  AP Photo/Gemunu Amarasinghe
 

Myint Naing's 22 years in Indonesia had come to an end. He finally received the help he had longed for to return to his small village and be reunited with his family, one of the hundreds rescued and aided to return to their families in the wake of a year-long AP expose of the labour abuses abetting Southeast Asia's seafood industry. Reports documenting the slave-caught fish shipped from Indonesia to Thailand where it was exported to the U.S. spoke volumes of the plight of these poor people.

It was revealed that the supply chains of supermarkets and distributors included Wal-Mart, Sysco and Kroger, and companies such as Fancy Feast, Meow Mix and Iams emphasize their condemnation of such labour abuse, and having had no idea that their pet food was a product of slave fishing conditions; vowing they are committed to taking steps to prevent recurrences for the future.

Alien Invasions

Creatures not in their very own natural habitat usually as a result have no natural enemies. All other things being equal, if those creatures find themselves in an atmosphere/environment that does not threaten their existence, they will thrive. They will discover what they can consume, and they will compete with the other creatures whose habitat the new environment is, for available food. 

Sometimes the new creatures are of a size and voracious appetite as to triumph over native species in food choices; the more aggressive, the more adaptable, the more ravenous and insatiable the creature is, the more chances it will succeed in successfully challenging the life and life-cycle of native species. The native species may find themselves too challenged and begin an agonizing decline.

And the foreign invaders thrive at the expense of the native species. Amazingly, the Florida Everglades, a large swampy area, as a region of subtropical wetlands in the southern portion of the State of Florida comprises the southern half of a large watershed. It is home to a large number of  native creatures from alligators to waterbirds. And snakes. Native species of snakes.

Everglades

 

However, it is the large exotic, non-native species that constitute a problem. And the problem is huge. Florida has become home to more exotic species of amphibians and reptiles than any other such area existing on the Globe. And most of them have been illegally introduced to the Everglades. Like the Burmese pythons. Whose enormous size and appetite introduce utter havoc to nature's order. 

 

 

J Pat Carter/AP   TV crews capture Capt. Jeff Fobb of the Miami-Dade Fire Rescue's Venom Response Unit as he holds a python during the kick-off ceremonies Saturday for the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission's month-long 'Python Challenge.'

In a desperate attempt to rid themselves of the presence of these serpents disrupting the environment, the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission  and the state are offering cash prizes to those who capture the longest python, as well as those who collect the greatest numbers of pythons, in a "Python Challenge" competition that ends at midnight on February 10.

Sad for the pythons whose fault it is not that they have invaded a geography not their own. But the infestation is intolerably inimical to the natural structure of the Everglades and the native creatures that nature intended to inhabit it.

The Hermit Kingdom

 

12-242   Burma, 1972    the ancient city of Bagan   part of an archival project, featuring the photographs of nick dewolf

 

Burma, now called Myanmar, is a country that has been for so long isolated by deliberate decree of its ruling military, which has just the last few years relaxed rule to a civil authority, that it has never developed its resources.  It is an impoverished country with a proud heritage and tradition.  The majority religion is Buddhist.  Popularly, Buddhism is considered a religion of peace and goodwill and respect for others.

The country is comprised, though of many ethnic and religious groups.  Among them Christians, Hindus, Sikhs and Muslims.  In the diversity of language, religion and ethnic groups Burma has much in common with other eastern countries like India and China.  And that mixture of traditions and heritage often brings with it historic grudges and suspicion, along with persecution and violence.

That's the unsavoury side of things, along with the fact of the iron-fisted rule of Myanmar's generals, myopic and xenophobic in their outlook on the world outside their own.  They had in fact, much in common with North Korea, another dysfunctional, aggressive society where human rights abuses run rampant and people live miserable, impoverished lives, threatened by privation.

But Myanmar/Burma is turning itself inside out, along with the release of its most famous civil rights campaigner, opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi from house arrest.  And the country whose 50,000 towns and villages are not yet connected to the country's primitive national power grid, is set to change.  Burma is a tropical paradise as far as Nature is concerned.

It is an emerald world, though not a very large one; its size analagous to one of Canada's prairie provinces.  It has a plenitude of water, not yet harnessed for hydroelectric power.  And its ancient rainforest has not yet been ravaged for lumber, with forests of teak and other unique exotic wood.  Its natural resources include oil and gas.  Along with precious gemstones like jade, ruby and sapphire.  And it has ample copper and gold.

The world is eager to enter Burma, to help it exploit its natural resources.  China was there first, and has been there when no one else has been, so it could be said China has the inside track on development and exploitation.  Labour is elemental in the country, with women carryhing loads of crushed stones on their heads in roadwork.  Labourers work from 7 in the morning to 3 in the afternoon, earning on average $3 daily.

In Burma, among its 64-million people, and its traditions and falling-apart imperial buildings, grand natural settings of palm groves and teak forests, monasteries and pagodas, the exotic East can still be seen as it was elsewhere less than a hundred years ago.  The Burmese wear their traditional cloth-wrapped garb, not Western clothing as it seen elsewhere in the developed East.  The pace of life is peaceful.  All that is set to change.

Korea, Japan and India are lined up, waiting to be able to extract resources and help Burma enter a new century, a new industrial age.  And right behind them are the countries of the West, including Canada which has recently sent a high-level government-and-trade delegation to the country.  And, sadly, it won't take too long before the natural beauty of the country slowly evolves, the forests cut back, the land mined for its riches.

The Burmese will slowly live better lives, will possess more material goods, have better access to health services and education for their children as they passage into the future leaving their storied past behind.