Burma
Fishy analysis
Reports of media censorship from Burma are hardly surprising, but the iron-fisted Censor Board has recently chosen an unlikely target: the fishing industry. The clampdown was put in place after a weekly publication, which has remained unnamed, printed the volume of fish exports for this fiscal year. More to the point, the paper also claimed that the figures fell far short of those from the previous year.
And indeed, something does seem fishy here. While the projected export amount was initially set at USD 850 million, it was readjusted to USD 500 million in early 2009. The real number, meanwhile, was actually just USD 483 million, just 56 percent of the original target. The destruction caused by Cyclone Nargis and the global financial crisis are said to be the causes of this downturn in numbers.
Evidently, the generals did not like this information to be known, even if the fall in numbers was due to factors largely outside of their hands. But let us be clear on something here. It is not that such statistics are regularly kept from scribes. In fact, journalists are allowed to attend the weekly meetings of the Myanmar Fishery Federation, which discusses these and related numbers. The media has even been allowed to report on the figures without first submitting them for approval. What is not allowed, however, and what was done by the offending journal, is to take the initiative to draw comparisons with projected and previous numbers. The bigger picture is always the dangerous one for authoritarian regimes.