Between 1960 and 1981, Bangladesh thus suffered 17 major floods and 37 significant cyclones.? It is this history that led the special correspondent of the French daily, Le Monde, to ask: "Between cyclones and floods, does Bangladesh really have a chance?"3
Dangers of geography
There is no denying the fact that Bangladesh's geographical position exposes it to exceptional dangers. The country lies at the mouths of three rivers which form the second most extensive delta in the world, after that of the Amazon. The Ganges collects the waters of the Himalayas on the Nepal and Indian slopes; the Brahmaputra (called the Jamuna in Bangladesh) brings down the waters from the Tibetan and Chinese slopes, while the Meghna draws in the waters of the Himalayan foothills of
Assam. Together their basins cover a surface area of 1.5m square kms inhabited by more than 500 million people.*
The monsoons of June to September bring down on this region some of the heaviest rainfall in the world. During the
September 1988 spate, the outflow of the
Ganges reached 72,300 cubic metres a second, that of the Brahmaputra 98,600 and the Meghna, 13,000. By way of comparison, the outflow of the Seine in spate reaches 2,500 cubic metres a second.
These three mighty rivers and the 250odd others that water Bangladesh carry some 1-2 billion tonnes of silt every year.
When they arrive at the Indo-Bengali frontier at a mere 22.5 metres above sea level, they have a further 400 to 500 kilometers to go across land mainly composed of the same sediment, and which is almost without rocks. The result is rivers that divide up into hundreds of branches whose main stream can be several kilometers across, which frequently change their bed and which overflow every year.
ON APRIL 28 this year a cyclone of unprecedented violence devastated the eastern seaboard of
Bangladesh. The official death toll was 125,000 and some 10 million people were made homeless.
### J-F MARQUIS*
Meanwhile, the warm waters of the Gulf of Bengal favour the formation of cyclones, in the same way as the Caribbean. The number of major cyclones to strike Bangladesh each year averages out at 1.5.6 Winds of between 150 and 200 kms an hour whip up waves three to six metres high. A tenth of Bangladesh lies below sea level and one third is only two to four metres above it. Only on the western part of the coast is the effect of the cyclones softened somewhat by mangrove forests.®
High population growth
It is currently fashionable to add population growth - 2.4% a year — to these natural dangers. "In Bangladesh it is simple enough; the population grows faster than food production." Some 115 million people inhabit this land of 144,000 square kms and the average population density is 900 people to every square km.
It is to these causes that the poverty of this country, numbered by the World Bank among the ten poorest on the planet, is often attributed. This is a country where, each year, a million children of less than five years die of malnutrition and disease, and where, according to the World Health Organization (WHO), two thirds of the population lives beneath the basic minimum; half of the rural population is underfed."
In fact, the poverty of rural Bangladeshis is explained in the first place by a social rather than a natural condition.
* This article first appeared in the May 31 edition of the Swiss revolutionary Marxist newspaper La Brèche.
2. Overseas Development Institute, Briefing paper,
4. New Scientist, 13.4.1991, and Ambio, June 1989.
7. Die Zeit, 10.5.1989.
BANGLADESH Some 60% are landless or almost landless (that is, have less than 20 ares - 1 are = 100 square metres). Furthermore this proportion continues to grow. In 1947 10% were landless or almost landless, in 1961 the figure had risen to 13-17%. By 1984, however, 60% of the rural population had fallen into these categories. 2
Furthermore, peasants who have less than 100 ares of poor land or less than 50 ares of irrigated land fall into the same insecure category. According to circumstances they are in a position to provide for their families for between three and nine months of the year. For the rest they have to find work as agricultural labourers or sharecroppers. In the latter case they abandon half of the crop to the owner, although they assume the entire cost of the farming. Often they cannot get through the year without borrowing from a village notable: 10-15% interest per month is the going rate, with the land serving as collateral. Thus more often than not they end up losing their land.
The other end of the scale
At the other end of the social scale are found the jotdars. Making up 7% of families, they own 50% of the land. More often than not they also exercise political authority as well as control over irrigation canals, which offers many opportunities for corruption.!3
The process of dispossession affects fishing — which provides 80% of protein
— as well as agricultural land. Each year the state auctions fishing rights; very often it is the rich owners who get them, after bribing the relevant officials 4.
A good example is the farming of shrimps. Shellfish exports have risen from
1,000 tonnes in 1980/81 to 23,000 tonnes in 1989/90, making up some 12% of Bangladesh exports, supported by the World
Bank. 'S Shrimp farming can have disastrous consequences. Thus 100,000 Namasudra, Hindus living in south-wester
Bangladesh, are today facing the threat of losing their livelihood, since the marshes they live in, which provide them with crops during the dry season, are no longer drying out due to the construction of dykes thirty years ago. The only hope is to
8. Tages Anzeiger, 31.5.1991.
9. Le Monde, 22.5.1991
10. International Herald Tribure, 16.5.1991.
11. Guardian Weekly, 12.5.1991.
12. René Dumont, Finis les lendemains qui chantent,
Bangladesh, Nepal, "'aide" contre le développement,
Paris, 1985, p. 50
13. Libération, 18.6.1985
14. René Dumont, op. cit., p. 90
15. Panascope, January 1991. June 24, 1991 • #209 International Viewpoint
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BANGLADESH break down the dykes, but this would threaten the shrimp farming which has since been started up on the other side of the dykes. For the time being the rich landowners who own the shrimp farms have been able to get their way.
On the other hand, at Khulna, it is the shrimp farmers themselves who have broken down the dykes with the aim of allowing in the seawater, drowning ricefields. 16 Shrimp farming, furthermore, requires consolidation of land holdings and thus is inherently favourable to the big owners.!?
This is the social background that has led hundreds of thousands of Bangladeshis to set up on extremely dangerous land. The silt brought down by the rivers endlessly gives rise to the formation of new islands, both in the rivers themselves and in the estuaries. As soon as these new islands appear, they are settled by poor Bangladeshis. However a spate or a cyclone can sweep them away, in the literal sense of the terms; in 1985 this happened to the island of Urirchar and its 10,000 inhabitants. 18 As Allister MacGregor, professor at Bath University explains: "these are the poorest people and they take the biggest risks. They live on the edge of a precipice. One flood is enough to make them pay the supreme price. They are forced into this situation by their pov-
Dyking of rivers proposed
These facts need to be borne in mind when considering the remedies proposed to defeat the periodic flooding of Bangladesh. Following the spate of 1988, on September 29 of that year French president François Mitterrand proposed to the UN General Assembly nothing less than the dyking up of the three rivers.20
This special adviser, Jacques Attali, visited Bangladesh to advance a cause which, as the French daily, Libération, explained, was not wholly motivated by goodwill: "the humanitarian issue is at once political and commercial. We have to get France into position for what could be the big construction project of the century. "21
What enticed the French entrepreneurs was the vision of 4,000 kms of dykes of between 4.5 and 7.4 metres in height, necessitating 20 years of work and costing $5 to $10bn. Such an undertaking implies some 4280 to $10m per year for construction and the same ever after for maintenance.22
Despite some highly critical studies, notably from American sources, this project was put before the summit of the Big Seven in July 1989 and accepted by the World Bank that December as a basis for research. An initial credit of $146.3m has been granted for preliminary studies to be conducted over five years. Salim Rashid, 1O remaofessor at illinois University has remarked: "it is enough to make you International Viewpoint #209 • June 24, 1991 despair when you find out the low importance granted to agriculture, the socioeconomic impact, fishing and the environment, since of these $146m only $2m are designated for such matters. "23
The commercial interest of such a pharaonic project is obvious enough, but its positive impact on the Bangladeshi people is not so obvious.24
Carrying out the plan would mean the displacement of between 2 and 5 million people; 180,000 people would have to be removed from 20,000 hectares of land in a country where there is already an intense land hunger.
The confinement of the rushing waters in the canals would raise the level of the high waters without anyone knowing how the existing hydraulic system would react. It would also increase the level of the water downstream, creating in the monsoon season an abnormal sea-level and floodings upstream.
A big challenge
Such a construction would have to be perfectly carried out and excellently maintained. In case of a burst dyke the resulting disaster would be worse than the floods now. This is a big challenge for a very poor country. Indeed, many scientists doubt the very possibility of blocking the flow of such powerful rivers which cross a rockless delta.
The subsidence of the delta would no longer be compensated by silt from the rivers. On the other hand, as has been shown by experience in China, the dyking would lead to a rise in the level of the
Furthermore, by ending the nutrient supply provided by the river-borne silt, the dyking would imply a radical change in agricultural methods. The loss could perhaps be met by using more intensive farming methods, whether by combining fertilizers and artificial irrigation, or by installing sluices in the dykes, allowing a controlled flooding of the fields. In either case the power of the rich peasants would strengthened. shows that it is they alone who have profited from the "green revolution" and it is they who have taken control of the sluices in the 225 kms of dykes already built along the Brahmaputra. James K. Boyce, professor at the University of Massachusetts, remarks that: "the replacement of closed water cultivation for open water cultivation is also a substitution of private for collective property. In a socioeconomic context marked by extreme differences of wealth and poverty, this 17. Le Monde, 22.5.1991. 18. Libération, 28.5.1991. 19. Guardian Weekly, 12.5.1991. 20. Libération, 31.10.1991. 22. Croissance, May 1990.
Bangladesh environmental letter, Octobercan result for the poor in a dramatic closing off of their access to aquatic resources."25
Twenty percent of Bangladesh is flooded during a normal monsoon, and this plays a vital role in agriculture and fishing. It is thus not surprising that the first of the World Bank studies of the dyke project have revealed that "the floods are not the main preoccupation of the Bangladeshi peasants. The scourge of the moneylenders, land distribution and the ravages of disease are much more basic questions for the rural population."26
The objective of blocking the rivers is highly questionable, both from an ecological and social point of view. The beneficiaries will be, apart from multinationals, the ruling layers in Bangladesh, through corruption or the strengthening of their control over agricultural resources. In fact, "gentle" means exist for dealing with the most severe floods: the improvement of the early waring system coordinated with India and Nepal, which can give a week's warning; the construction of raised shelters; the building of special dykes to protect essential installations. The maintenance of existing dykes (those of the capital Dacca are currently used for house-building), to facilitate the canals and basins and improve the circulation of the water, would furthermore provide work and thus make a further contribution to the struggle against desperate poverty? The struggle against cyclones
The struggle against the effects of the cyclones, which are far more destructive than the floods, presents the same kind of problems. After the 1970 cyclone, a mound ("killa") and shelter building programme was agreed on and won support from the World Bank. By this April only some 300 of the 2,500 planned shelters had been built. They were effective and saved thousands of lives. However, some 5,000 are needed to cover need on the coast. 28 At the same time, while the alarm system permitted the evacuation of hundreds of thousands of people, the fact that many are too poor to own a radio was not in fact adequately compensated for by the system of volunteers charged with spreading the news to their neighbours. Quite simple projects would thus immediately reduce the impact of these natural disasters. In the longer term, land reform is indispensable in order both to increase production and lessen the pressure on the land, which forces ever more Banglade shis to settle on the edge of the sea. 24. On these problems, see Croissance, May 1990; Libération, 31.10.1990, New Scientist, 13.4.1991 and 2.12.1989; Panascope, March 1991. 25. Bangladesh environmental letter, OctoberDecember 1990. 26. Le Monde, 4.5.1991. 27. René Dumont, op. cit. 28. Die Zeit, 10.5.1991 and Guardian Weekly, 12.5.1991.
A new era of
PREPARATIONS for the 7th Congress of the Vietnamese
Communist Party world peace?
(VCP) are nearing their end. The burning question of pluralism has been
Indonesia). The official line from Washington, London and Paris has scarcely concealed the traditional pursuit of imperialist objectives, such as the desire for politico-military hegemony over the Third ruled out of order in the official debates in an authoritarian manner. This question is nonetheless at the heart of the crisis which is undermining the party!. The "contribution" of Hoàng
Minh Chính, contained in this issue of /V, bears witness to this, as do the interview with Bùi Tín and the "Letter" of
Nguyên Khac Viên which we have previously published?.
Hoàng Minh Chính is a cadre who was decorated for valour during the resistance to the French occupation in 1954. This former rector of the Institute of Philosophy fell into disgrace in
1963 for denouncing the influence of Stalinism and Maoism on
Vietnamese Communism. He paid for his obstinate defence of his ideas with 15 years of detention or house arrest, and expulsion from the ranks of the party.
In his "contribution", Chính attacks the single party system, noting correctly that it necessarily smothers any real democracy. But he seems also to have many illusions on the role of the market in the development of the capitalist Third
World, on the United Nations and the "presidential parliamentary" regime of bourgeois democracy.
W
E are not in a position to discuss the fundamental conceptions put forward by