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A Bangladeshi man poses with captured rats in Khagrachari, in the remote Chittagong Hill Tracts region which faces a serious risk of prolonged famine and bubonic plague unless a ballooning rat population is brought under control, according to experts.Bangladesh's remote Chittagong Hill Tracts region faces a serious risk of prolonged famine and bubonic plague unless a ballooning rat population is brought under control, experts say.The UN's World Food Programme (WFP) began distributing three million dollars of emergency food supplies to some 120,000 people in the southeastern tribal area bordering India and Myanmar last May, after the rat population exploded.The rats-some weighing as much as 1.5 kilogrammes (3.3 pounds)-feed on bamboo forests in the hilly region.Dhaka University zoology professor Nurjahan Sarker recently visited the hill tracts and sounded the alarm over the "devastating" impact of the year-long rat plague."The threats of a famine-fuelled conflict are real as the rats are destroying everything in the hills," she said.Adding to the urgency of the situation, she said authorities must act fast to avoid an outbreak of deadly bubonic plague."I don't think the government has understood the gravity of the crisis or figured out how to tackle such an unprecedented situation."Steven Belmain, a rodent ecologist of Britain's University of Greenwich-in Bangladesh studying the impact of the rat infestation-said the rodent population was doubling in size every three weeks.This means, of course, they must spread into new areas in search of food."In addition to destroying nearly all field crops in the region, the rats get into people's houses, eating stored food and damaging all sorts of personal possessions and biting people while they sleep," Belmain said."The whole region has been affected by localised famine, forcing people to depend on food aid.Food shortages will be a permanent feature here for many years," Belmain told AFP."We have captured 2,000 big rats from one hectare (2.47 acres) of land. I can tell you the situation is worsening as rats are invading new territories."The WFP will begin a 2.6-million-dollar programme in April to help the thousands of people who have lost their livelihoods because of the rats...
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