Some residents of Mindat Town in Chin State are severely short of basic food supplies and have been reduced to foraging in the forest to sustain themselves.
Filmmaker Salai Nai Hone recorded the daily struggle faced by an elderly woman living in a Mindat Township village on 28 February 2025. She has no essential food supplies like rice and salt and instead has to rely on bananas, banana stems, and edible leaves foraged from the forest.
According to Salai Nai Hone, she is not the only Mindat Township resident facing such dire conditions because they were unable to flee the junta’s many airstrikes and intense artillery shelling in Mindat Township.
He said: “She had no rice and was surviving mainly on bananas, banana stems, and banana buds. When I found her, I gave her as much rice, oil, and salt as I could afford. Without these basic staples, she had to forage for wild vegetables in the forest every day. There are many others like her in Mindat Township—people who, for various reasons, couldn’t evacuate from the conflict and are now living in extremely dire conditions.”
Many of the residents left in Mindat Township are increasingly facing shortages of basic food items and are being forced to borrow essentials like rice, oil, and salt to survive, according to Ko Lawrence, a spokesperson for the Mindat IDP camps’ management committee who is also from a Mindat Township village.
He said: “Some of the people who chose to stay in their homes during the fighting, instead of evacuating, are in an even more dire situation than the IDPs. There are people like that in my village too. They have no rice to eat and are relying on borrowed rice. For now, we still have resources to support them, but if those resources run out, it will be very difficult for them.”
Skyrocketing commodity prices combined with rising transport costs and lower prices being paid for crops grown by Mindat Township villagers have exacerbated the problem.
Villagers in Mindat Township mainly grow grains such as finger millet and yellow millet for their own consumption and commercial crops that they sell, such as konjac. But crops are heavily taxed at junta checkpoints in the area so traders are offering farmers less for their commercial crops, meaning they have less to buy staples such as rice and salt.
To make matters worse the price of staple foods such as rice, oil and salt in Mindat Township have trebled since the February 2021 coup. Previously 1 pyi (about 2kg) of rice cost about 2,000 MMK, now it costs about 6,250 MMK.
Civil Society Organisations (CSOs) only have a minimal presence in Mindat Township meaning that residents only have minimal access to humanitarian aid. Also, to make matters worse, the US Government has ordered a suspension of funding from the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), according to Ko Lawrence.
He said to Khonumthung Times: “Mindat [Township] has very few CSOs, and the presence of NGOs is also minimal. Some of the organisations that were operating withdrew in 2024 and 2025. Furthermore, the suspension of USAID has had a significant impact on the people of Mindat [Township], particularly the IDPs [internally displaced persons], who have suffered the most. We’ve heard from some organisations that aid that was already planned for distribution has been put on hold since the suspension order was issued. There has been no increase in aid from CSOs and NGOs, and in fact, we’re seeing a decline in the aid that was previously available.”
The Mindat IDP camps’ management committee is compiling a list of people facing extreme food shortages categorised by their background and the situation they are facing. The data collected will be used to help distribute what food and aid there is to the most needy.
The Chin Brotherhood Alliance (CB Alliance) successfully captured Mindat Town on 21 December 2024, declaring it a junta-free area. However, in February 2025, the junta resumed airstrikes targeting Mindat Town and Mindat Township.
Since 11 February, Mindat Chinland Defence Force (Mindat CDF), an ally of the Chin Brotherhood Alliance, has taken responsibility for resettling IDPs in Mindat Town and rebuilding the town. This task has been complicated because the junta resumed airstrikes on Mindat Town and Mindat Township in February 2025.