A street market in Yangon, Myanmar’s biggest city. Residents are anxious about high inflation and also fear recent floods will drive food prices higher. Credit: Ant/IPS
By Guy Dinmore, and a reporter in Yangon
YANGON, Myanmar, Sep 23 2026 (IPS)
Isolated and at constant war with itself, Myanmar’s humanitarian crisis is deepening as global challenges far exceed the capacity to respond of a military regime increasingly focused on its own survival.
The climate crisis, soaring commodity prices triggered by wars in Europe and the Middle East, plus worldwide cuts in donor aid are all hitting Myanmar hard. The regime’s inability to govern a fragmented and restive country with nearly four million internally displaced people has been exposed to the full since it seized power over five years ago.
Widespread floods caused by heavy monsoon rains since July have affected over 470,000 people, according to an assessment by the World Health Organization. Cases of malaria and dengue have been increasing, as well as outbreaks of cholera.
“Everyone is starving and cut off. Yes, everyone is facing food shortages,” said an activist calling himself Bruce, describing the situation in Shwebo township in the north-central Sagaing region, one of the main conflict zones and rice transshipment centres hit by floods.
Local and international aid organisations struggle to get help through conflict zones where the military is fighting a shifting array of ethnic armed organisations (EAOs) and local resistance groups while syphoning off what it can.
“Armed hostilities, movement restrictions and administrative requirements continue to block access, underscoring the need for safe, sustained and unhindered humanitarian reach to vulnerable communities,” the UN Office for Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) said in a July bulletin .
“Myanmar remains one of the world’s most severe humanitarian crises, with more than 16 million people in need as conflict, displacement, protection risks and access constraints intensify urgent needs nationwide,” OCHA said, noting that by end-March “humanitarian partners” had managed to reach 1.6 million people.
Floods have driven up food prices, already exacerbated by rising costs of fuel and fertilisers caused by Russia’s war on Ukraine and Iran’s blockade of the Strait of Hormuz following attacks by the US and Israel.
All sides exact a price in Myanmar, Bruce said, with cargo trucks moving north from the regime-controlled city of Mandalay to Shwebo having to pay fees at multiple military checkpoints and those run by other armed groups. Farmers in neighbouring Shan state growing rice and tomatoes are also facing “devastating losses” and being driven into deep poverty, he said.
Shwebo has experienced power blackouts of up to 20 consecutive days. As darkness falls, residents do not dare venture outside for fear of forced conscription by the regime, especially in rural areas. Households pay levies to avoid conscription, even those with only single women.
Some people are being forced into a second round of conscription as the military struggles to replenish its ranks, stretched across the country. Over 100,000 people have been conscripted, according to some estimates.
At night authorities inspect mobile phones. If they find online games, evidence of Starlink use or unauthorised communication devices then the individuals are immediately taken for military service.
Inflation and extortion reach deep into prisons too, said Bruce, a former political prisoner. Skin diseases like scabies are common, and the cost of a particular drug bought by relatives has soared more than eight times, while even traditional medicines like neem leaves have gone up fivefold.
Prison staff and those manning checkpoints even take their cuts of peanut snacks, driving up prices paid by prisoners.
The numbers displaced by conflict continue to rise. Fighting in the central Magway region in recent months has added over 200,000 more since May, according to some UN estimates. People fleeing conflict are moving to safer areas, but host communities have limited capacity to accommodate them.
U Than is a farmer in the Ayeyarwady delta and was struggling to make ends meet even before recent floods hit the major rice-growing region, destroying crops and jeopardising the next planting season. Fortunately his land has been spared destruction, but everyone is keeping a close eye on nearby levees.
“Farming has become a cycle of borrowing just to survive,” he said, complaining that the cost of fertiliser has risen five-fold and that fuel is increasingly expensive and difficult to obtain.
“We are working harder, borrowing more, and spending more, but the income from our harvest is no longer enough to cover the cost of farming or even our basic living expenses.” Families are forced to cut back their spending on health and education.
Yangon, Myanmar’s biggest city, feels somewhat insulated from the recent natural disasters and ongoing civil war. But inflation is hitting the pockets of its six million people, including city officials and their families, who squeeze more money from residents on trumped-up charges or bribes to avoid conscription.
“The junta stooges are resorting to all sorts of methods, legal or illegal, to recruit people while at the same time making money in the process,” one long-time resident told IPS.
“Life in Yangon is morphing into a new normal, with people feeling less safe about their lives as crimes are widespread. So many cases of theft and robberies go unreported or under-reported.”
A cholera outbreak in central Yangon in August, the second in two years, was blamed on poor hygiene among street vendors whose cheap food is even more attractive as inflation bites. The regime responded by shutting down their businesses in six city townships. Outbreaks have also been reported in Sittwe, one of the last regime strongholds in Rakhine State, as well as flood-affected areas.
Reports that CCTV artificial intelligence and facial scanning technology were deployed at a checkpoint in Mandalay city have raised fears that the regime is adopting widespread surveillance controls pioneered by China, its closest ally.
Min Aung Hlaing, leader of the 2021 coup, has proved resilient and uncompromising in directing a brutal retaliation against the popular resistance and was confident enough to swap his general’s uniform for a civilian suit as president after tightly orchestrated elections this year.
The Independent Investigative Mechanism for Myanmar, set up by the UN Human Rights Council, stated in its annual report that its findings “show a pattern of deliberate aerial attacks on civilians, arbitrary detentions, torture and sexual violence committed by the Myanmar military.”
The military escalated its aerial attacks and other crimes against civilians in the lead-up to the elections, and these have continued unabated, the IIMM said, listing the targeting of homes, schools, medical facilities, religious buildings and camps for internally displaced persons.
“This underscores the urgent need to hold those responsible to account,” it said. The IIMM is also investigating alleged atrocities involving armed groups opposed to the military.
For the moment, accountability seems a distant prospect, at best.
Since Min Aung Hlaing’s assumption of the presidency in April, the former general has been accepted on official visits to Belarus, Russia, Kazakhstan, India, China, Laos, Vietnam and Thailand. The Trump administration has not rolled out the red carpet but has eased sanctions against some of the regime elite and is engaging on matters of particular concern to the US, such as scam centres.
The regime’s growing de facto recognition abroad poses a further threat to the struggling efforts to exert its authority in liberated areas by the parallel National Unity Government (NUG). Established by lawmakers ousted in 2021 when Aung San Suu Kyi and other prominent leaders were jailed, the NUG managed to conclude agreements in March with several major ethnic armed organisations (EAOs) in an attempt to forge a unified political and military resistance.
Calling themselves the Steering Council for the Emergence of a Federal Democratic Union (SCEF), the alliance has stated its commitment to a negotiated political solution that would end military rule and exclude the generals from politics.
“To get there we’re pursuing all available avenues, including military means,” a senior resistance official told IPS.
However, there is scepticism that Min Aung Hlaing will deal with the new collective entity and will continue to insist on bilateral ceasefire talks with individual EAOs while refusing to recognise the NUG as an interlocutor. Several major armed groups dependant to varying degrees on neighbouring China have also kept the SCEF at arm’s length.
“Substantive negotiations between the Tatmadaw [the Myanmar military] and SCEF members are likely to prove challenging,” Morgan Michaels, a southeast Asia defence expert, wrote in a recent analysis for the International Institute of Strategic Studies.
“Meaningful progress in Myanmar – whether political, economic or humanitarian – would need to start with a broad conflict de-escalation, which at a minimum would require ceasefires between the Tatmadaw and the EAOs. Unfortunately, the path to de-escalation is likely to be long and fraught with dilemmas.”
IPS UN Bureau Report
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Floods, Hunger and Disease Pile on Myanmar’s Civil War Misery
Aggregated summary from an independent source. Read the original at IPSnews.