The department’s chief officer, U Win Hlaing Oo, said that 1,050 baskets of free crop seeds have been made available to farmers whose land was damaged in the recent floods.

“Paddy fields were included among the over 2,000 acres of farmland that were flooded. We will ask them to replant with plants of the same age,” he said on August 15.

Heavy rain inundated mountain streams and rivers in Kayin State last month, prompting flooding.

Among the 430,000 acres of farmland in the state, crops were already planted in more 320,000 acres at the time of the flooding, the state agriculture department said. The department has been making records of crop pests in the flood-affected farmlands and is teaching farmers about fertilizers that can make the paddy plants grow stronger, U Win Hlaing Oo added.

Local administrators in the state say they are still waiting on the promised seed replacements, however.

“The Department of Agriculture said they will provide crop seeds for the damaged paddies, but I haven’t seen them so far,” said Mann San Nyunt Maung, the administrator of Kha Leh Village Group in Kya-in Seikkyi township.

He added that replacement seeds are needed even in areas where the crops were not decimated in order to ensure a reliable harvest later in the year.

“Not all the plants have died. Some plots have been damaged. Even though the crops may grow bigger, we can’t depend on them,” he said.

Last year, paddy fields in Kayin State were blighted by an infestation of pests. The Department of Agriculture said it has been conducting best-practices trainings in order to prevent another dip in rice production this year.

According to an official from the agriculture department, Kayin State produces on average over 30 million baskets of rice per year.