Last week, from the top floors of the luxury towers near Yangon's Sule Pagoda, we watched hundreds of soldiers descend from their trucks, form lines and start shooting.

Within ten minutes, they had cleared a perimeter around the pagoda. And they carried on for the rest of the day until they'd forced everyone from the streets - from the stalls where they cook and sell food for a pittance, from the blankets where they hawk Chinese-made T-shirts, from their only sources of livelihood.

The curfew doesn't affect the middle class who go to the office every day between 9am and 5pm. Those suffering most are the poorest. Women who wake at 2am to go in the dark to the wholesale fish and vegetable markets, where they buy stock to sell. The children they must feed on less than a dollar a day.

For them, life has become harder and harder over the past two decades.

In Myanmar, the percentage of people living below the poverty line increases every year. A soon-to-be-published report from the United Nations and the government puts the figure at 36 percent.

Meanwhile, the riches of the country - teak, rubies and natural gas - continue to be siphoned off by the ruling generals and the companies that support them. Sanctions imposed by the United States and Europe are meaningless when China blasts the mines and Malaysians pump the gas.

Pakkoku is a tiny town in Magway, known as the Dry Zone - a strip of desolate land between the mountains and forests that line Myanmar's borders. It is over-populated, over-farmed and underdeveloped.

After the rains stop and the meagre rice harvest is in, most young men and women leave, looking for any work that'll earn them a little money to send home to their families.

For three years, a non-governmental organisation that prefers not to be named has been tirelessly weighing and measuring children in the Dry Zone. Children are added to the list when they're born and taken off if they manage to reach the age of five.

I analyse the lines showing me how they're growing. Too often they're in the shape of a rainbow - but at the end, there's no pot of gold. The rainbow dips. The line stops. A child dies. Many children die.

In a country with little data on the health of its children, the thousands of numbers I add, subtract and compare tell me something that most people feel but cannot prove.

FAMINE?

Here in Myanmar, a country rich in expensive teak and glowing rubies, children are dying as if there were a famine. Between July and September last year, in 80 villages in the Dry Zone, 312 children were born and 112 died.

Out of a population of 4,789, this means the child death rate was nearly two per 10,000 per day. Humanitarians use the label "famine" when there's no food and more than two children per 10,000 die a day.

But it's not only food that's lacking in the Dry Zone. People have very little access to health care.

More than 3,000 children died this year in Myanmar in the worst dengue epidemic in a decade. But no one did anything about it. The newspapers were even forbidden to report on it.

There are also few job opportunities. Mothers have to leave their children for months at a time to travel to the other end of the country to work in fish processing factories, as cooks at the rubber plantations, or as sex workers at the mines.

No wonder the monks started walking in Pakkoku first, then in Sitwe, the capital of Rakhine State, another part of the country where people suffer needlessly. There, malnutrition rates have reached 20 percent. In Niger, in 2003, they were 18 percent.

Aid agency Action Against Hunger (AAH) said admissions to its feeding centres in the north of Rakhine were already increasing dramatically when the government hiked fuel prices in mid-August.

This boosted the cost of rice in the state by a third in a month, leaving more people unable to buy enough food. The number of malnourished children being treated at AAH's feeding centres in Sitwe rose by over 60 percent in less than a month.

The hardship of Rakhine's Rohinga Muslim minority is compounded by government discrimination against them. In the 1980s, many fled to Bangladesh, living in refugee camps for more than a decade.

Most have returned, but their access to agricultural land and jobs is restricted. The government doesn't seem to care, refusing to give them citizenship rights or identity cards.

The protests of the past two weeks suggest growing numbers of Myanmar's people have had enough of hunger, poverty and human rights abuses.

Even on Monday, with so many monks already dead, beaten or locked away, 800 risked their lives to march again in Pakkoku. They say they own nothing, so they have nothing to lose.

But what they do have of value is their knowledge of what's happening to an increasingly impoverished population, gleaned on their daily rounds for alms. The protests of the past two weeks suggest they're no longer prepared to stay silent about the growing crisis they're witnessing.

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