Guy Rogers' Elephant Ear

Spectre of famine an ever-present threat

IN HAPANIA village, central Bangladesh, Abdul Rahim goes out each morning with a bamboo pole to flick the dew off his rice plants to allow it to moisten the soil before it evaporates.

It is barely a month into the dry season and Hapania is served by a successful irrigation project, but the spectre of famine is never far from Bangladesh’s door and ingenious traditional survival techniques like this are hard to lay aside.

I met Rahim on an excursion south from Dhaka on Shaluk ferry, piloted by Capt Mushta Sharja, on the mighty Meghna River – but perhaps I should go back a bit.

Together with 23 other environmental journalists from 17 countries, I’ve been in Bangladesh this past week as a guest of the World Water Forum of Journalists and the International Water and Climate Secretariat of the UN.

We’ve listened to some fascinating speeches from secretariat representatives, discussed the problems facing our own countries and also had the opportunity to explore the incredible city of Dhaka.

There are 130-million people in Bangladesh, the capital is home to 10-million and this last figure is expected to triple in the next 20 years. The streets are a tumultuous kaleidescope of noise and never-ending movement: waves of pedestrians joust with bicycle rickshaws, tuk-tuks (three-wheel taxis), speeding cars, rust-encrusted double-decker buses and roaring trucks.

Threading their way through this chaos, sweating workers haul flat-bed trailers stacked high with goods – pipes, pumpkins, jute sheets, coconut matting (for insulation), drums of water, canisters of gas, bags of rice and more.

These workers labour, like so many others here, from dawn until late at night, in this case transporting goods from factories across the festering River Ganga (for which they are taxed) to the commercial hub.

At intervals through the day, as if from heaven itself, the voice of the imams boom down from loudspeakers set on walls high above the street, permeating earthward through the gray haze of the exhaust fumes, calling the faithful to prayer.

Monday was Independence Day, a buoyant occasion celebrating the spirit of the 1971 War of Liberation, which left three million Bangladeshis dead, but also freed their country from the hated governance of Pakistan.

It was also the day after Biswa Itjema. Staged once a year, the prayer festival is second in size only to Mecca. A vast hessian-roofed encampment was still in place but the stench and refuse diminished all awe.

Below the encampment is the Turag River and on the very edge of the east bank hundreds of temporary pit latrines had been dug.

Substantial run-off had obviously occurred and the stench of the water was truly terrible. Yet people were washing in it, and even fishing – a searing image of the developing world’s “terrible three” environmental problems: too many people, too few choices, too little awareness.

The next day, voyaging south on the Shaluk, we passed kilometre after kilometre of smoking brickworks but then these gave way to vegetable gardens and floating bamboo and hyacinth fish shelters. Fish called hilcha are attracted by these shelters, and netted as they move in and out of the cover of the hyacinth.

The same water weed, an exotic species introduced at the time of the British Raj, feeds the cattle in the villages and is dried and used for compost for the rice paddies. But in the rainy season it spreads rapidly, becoming a breeding ground for mosquitos and impeding river traffic.

The Meghna is one of 200 rivers and 25 000km of navigable waterway in Bangladesh, adding up to a vital conduit for trade and communication. The system is contracting for other reasons as well, however. Erosion from deforested areas, degradation of watersheds and poorly managed agricultural land have reduced dry season flows. The siltation carried downstream raises and broadens the river and the water cuts into the banks, creating more siltation, which is further exacerbated by wide-scale uncontrolled road construction.

Rising temperatures due to climate change are melting glaciers and snowcaps at the source, adding dangerous new volumes, and the flooding that occurs simply pulls more siltation down from the banks.

I learned from our co-ordinator, Marcel van den Heuvel of the International Water and Climate Secretariat, that a whole industry has grown out of this problem.

Dutch dredging giant Boskalis and others travel to stricken areas, increasingly in the developing world, where they are commissioned at great cost by the local governments to ensure that their rivers stay navigable.

The cash-strapped Bangladesh government spends R5-billion having its rivers dredged – a classic case of the crippling costs that can be incurred if environmental protection and sustainable development is not prioritised.

The Bangladesh government is now acting, however.

Watershed re-foresting projects are underway and, at places like Hapania, which used to be flooded for six months of the year, excellent water management schemes have been installed. The Meghna-Dhanagoda Irrigation Project serves 300 000 people and 17 500ha of land in and around the village.

Funded by the Asian Development Bank, it uses a maze of dykes and canals to inject water into the area in the dry season and drain it in the wet, allowing crop yield to grow three-fold.

Study of groundwater tube or surface wells have shown that many contain natural deposits of arsenic, poisoning drinking water and possibly even the rice irrigated by it. Now these wells can be avoided and the villagers, like Abdul Rahim, have surplus rice to sell, enabling them to send their children to school.

I was lucky enough to get on a helicopter on Saturday and we traversed a great stretch of the country – south to the cyclone shelters on the Bay of Bengal and west to the Sunderbans, home to one of the world’s last wild tiger populations.

From the air, it’s like a picture from a fairy tale: the villages cupped in pockets of forest, with the pukurs shining out from between the trees, children waving, a paddy-patchwork quilt in greens and browns, slashed with yellow mustard, all held together in the coiled embrace of the great brown rivers.

Bangladesh and Dhaka are a long way from South Africa and Port Elizabeth but the ailments, the beauty and the possibilities are echoed in different ways by our own situation.

As I write, far below my 11th floor hotel room, the bells of the rickshaw men are beginning to ring, dawn birdsong in these parts. Soon they’ll switch on their bat-like radar and begin to weave and dance with the traffic monster.

Across town, a few hours from now, water and climate experts from around the world, including Dr Roland Schulze of South Africa, will be meeting to present their findings following on a two-year investigation of these issues in their regions and how they relate to poverty.

These findings will be welded together into a joint document intended to be the keynote presentation at the Third World Water Forum in Japan in March.

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