Debt and misery stalk the delta’s salt farms
Life’s hard for the salt farming communities in the far south of Ayeyarwady Region, where services are basic, food is scarce and debt is never-ending.
It’s a 90-minute motorbike journey south from the Ayeyarwady delta town of Labutta before you get the first glimpses of the region’s salt-making villages.
The contrast with the green paddy fields and crab-farming ponds of the delta’s interior is stark. The salt farming communities are set in a vast, white landscape, the glare from which can be overpowering.
Frontier arrived at a little jetty where a woman was waiting with her two sons, aged 12 and eight months, for a small boat to cross a narrow creek. The woman, a worker at a nearby salt farm, looked as if she was more than 60 but when asked her age, she said she was 45.
Kyaw Lin Htoon
