Burma’s 52m people are facing deepening poverty as a result of its military government’s “ill-informed and outdated socio-economic policies” and “uncompromising attitude” to ethnic minorities, says a confidential United Nations report.

In a bleak assessment obtained by the Financial Times, Charles Petrie, the UN’s top official in Rangoon, said “increasingly arbitrary and widespread land confiscation” and the junta’s agricultural policies were fuelling rural hunger and driving people from their communities in search of work.