Farming family faces bleak future after deadly bushfires
WANDELLA, Australia: There is little that Australia’s deadly bushfires didn’t take from dairy and cattle farmers Tim and Warren Stalway. For nearly two days over New Year the brothers battled fierce blazes that tore through the family’s farms, the flames igniting on multiple fronts and wiping out almost everything in their path. The pair’s father, Robert, and brother, Patrick, died trying to defend their properties. All the family farms were burned to ashes and debris, and hundreds of cattle killed.
“I keep saying to myself that it’s not that bad, but it is that bad. It’s fucking terrible,” said Tim Stalway, 42, shaking his head in disbelief at he looked at his burnt out dairy farm near the town of Cobargo in New South Wales state. Warren Stalway fought back tears as he described his anguish at discovering his brother and father had died, and how other farmers donated their hay to keep his farm going.
“People have just turned up, they all want to help,” he said.
The scale of the recovery facing the two fifth-generation farmers is huge.
TAGAYTAY, Philippines: Farmer Jack Imperial woke to a picture of devastation after ash spewed from a volcano in the Philippines - his verdant green pineapple field had been transformed to a dirty dark grey. Imperial said his chances of salvaging produce from his 1-hectare (2.5-acre) farm were small and, in any case, there was no one to sell them to with tourists avoiding the Tagaytay area on the archipelago’s biggest island Luzon, 32 km (20 miles) from the Taal volcano.
“We just have to accept that we will incur a loss,” said Imperial, 49, who had never seen such a sight in 17 years of farming. “Even if we are able to harvest
TOKYO: Tokyo-based human rights activists yesterday decried recent remarks by Japan’s ambassador to Yangon, who told local media he did not
Destroyed machinery, felled trees and blackened farmland were surrounded by miles of damaged fencing on Tim Salway’s farm. Metal tanks were melted and hay and cattle sheds worth tens of thousands of dollars were flattened.
Salway lost 170 cows, including one that was so badly burned that it had to be shot. “They’re the only heifers I’ve got left,” he said, pointing to 30 cows gathering curiously, the sky behind them blanketed by haze from fires still burning on the other side of the valley.
“I’ve got no heifers for the next three years, they all got wiped in the fire. Just in cattle, if I look to replace them you’re looking at A$300,000 ($207,000).” Monster bushfires have razed bushland equivalent to the size of Bulgaria since the start of October, killing 28 people, destroying more than 2,500 homes and killing millions of animals. “The noise of it was like jumbo jets ... It snapped trees in half,” Tim Stalway said of the fires that destroyed much of the Cobargo farms. “I watched the flames get sucked down the hill, there was a boom, an almighty thump. It was my dad and my brother. It’s like a bomb’s gone off.”
“Annihilated” Warren Salway’s wife Helen, who has cancer, took refuge in a nearby town while he raced through smoke-filled lanes to get back to his cattle farm, twice running his truck off the road.
The bushfires crisis deals a further blow to farmers already struggling following
some pineapples, if customers are scared to come because of the eruption, the pineapples would just end up rotting.”
The impact of the volcano on the $330 billion national economy has been a blip, despite cancelled flights and a day of work lost because of a heavy ashfall in the capital Manila, 70 km (45 miles) away, on Sunday. But for some of the farmers growing pineapples, bananas and coffee nearby it has been a disaster. Brushing ash from a fruit, Imperial said he feared that the hot ash had harmed his crop and made it inedible. He used to sell his pineapples, in slices, chunks and juice, at a small stall frequented by tourists beside his house.
But the tourists have disappeared and tens of thousands of people have been evacuated from a danger zone around Taal. The alert level for the volcano stood at 4 on a 5-point scale on Wednesday, indicating that an “explosive eruption” remained imminent. —Reuters
think the Myanmar military committed genocide on the Rohingya Muslim minority in the country. More than 730,000 Rohingya fled the Southeast Asian nation to Bangladesh in 2017 after a military-led crackdown. The United Nations has said the campaign was executed with “genocidal intent” and included mass killings and rape.
The military offensive has sparked a series of ongoing legal cases filed in recent months at courts across the globe, including the International Criminal a three-year drought, which has been credited with fuelling the fires. “It’s just annihilated us,” said Warren Salway. “It’s just numbness.”
Salway spent more than a day using a bulldozer and excavator to bury 145 cows and 80 sheep. Many of the cows he found alive had to be shot due to their burns. “Years and years of breeding and you see them laying in a heap just dead,” he said. “That’s what you live for, your animals.” Tony Allen, a former local mayor whose own farm had a lucky escape, said the crisis was a wake-up call for
Court (ICC) and the International Court of Justice (ICJ), both based in the Hague. Zaw Min Htut, vice president of an advocacy group, Burmese Rohingya Association in Japan, said the ambassador’s remarks were “disturbing”.
“I am very disappointed and appealing again to the Japanese government. Please try to help Rohingya people and don’t side with criminals,” Zaw Min Htut told foreign correspondents in Tokyo. “Today the Japanese government do not even cooperate, not supporting UN policy makers to support an industry already doing it tough.
“The decision is do you want to keep an industry going, do you want to feed Australians with Australian food, or do you want to let the industry just evaporate and live off imported product?” he said. Tim Salway said quitting was not on his mind, but he doubted the family business would survive into a sixth generation. “I’ve got four kids and unless it improves, none of them will be taking this over,” he said. “Why do you want to do that to them?” —Reuters
Grey pineapples: Volcano shatters Philippines farm
Rights group slams Japan envoy for bad remarks on Rohingya
actions on Myanmar,” he said. His group supports about 250 Rohingya based in Japan.
Ichiro Maruyama, the Japanese ambassador to Myanmar, told local news website the Irrawaddy in December that he did not think the Myanmar military “committed genocide or (had the) intent of genocide”. He was previously quoted by the same outlet as saying that potential trade sanctions on Myanmar over the Rohingya crisis would be “utter nonsense”. —Reuters