Facinating article about a mast year in bamboo. Rat’s thrive and the following year people starve.

… Mizoram and Manipur … rats … army … teach … eradicate … flowering … bamboo … increase fertility rates … population explosion … crops … severe famines … the mautam in 1958-59 … triggered an insurgency … redrawing of boundaries…. Bamboo Flowering and Famine Control Schemes … rat tail … bounty … 200,000 rat tails… registering more tails… hunger currently prevail … grain production falling by 87% …collapse of the administrative machinery … refugee flows … worst is still to come….

Tip of the hat to Koranteng Ofosu-Amaah.