How to save Bangladesh?

An interview with Thomas Rath, IFAD Country Programme Manager for Bangladesh
Originally posted on New York Times Green blog

A woman prepares a fishing net for mending in Hamidpur, Bangladesh.
©IFAD/Alexandra Boulat

In just over a month, policy makers from around the world will meet in Rio de Janeiro for the United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development. The meeting has been called Rio+20, reflecting the two decades that have passed since a landmark conference on the environment and development was held in Rio in 1992. This time the main themes are energy, sustainable cities, food security, water shortages, the health of oceans, disaster readiness and assuring people a livelihood.

Bangladesh is a prime example of a vulnerable developing nation that faces formidable challenges in all these areas, and it will be directly affected by the decisions that are made — or not made — at the conference. Firm commitments have often been elusive on the international level.

We asked Thomas Rath, the country program manager for the United Nations International Fund for Agricultural Development project in Bangladesh, about the development obstacles the country faces, some of which are linked toclimate change and environmental degradation. Following are excerpts, edited for brevity and clarity.

Q.

How would you describe Bangladesh’s agricultural picture?

A.

Bangladesh, bordering India, Myanmar and the Bay of Bengal, is in the subtropical zone, very wet and flat and dominated by agriculture. Three large rivers from the Himalayas flow through the country, all ending in the bay on the southern coast. It’s a beautiful, fertile tropical delta.

The New York Times

About 150 million people live here, and the population density is one of the highest in the world after places like Singapore and Hong Kong. That’s 1,200 people per square kilometer (about four-tenths of a square mile). By comparison, in Mongolia there are only three or four people per square kilometer.

This density means that many farmers have very small land plots on which they struggle to feed their families. About 35 percent of the population lives under the poverty line of $1 a day, and about 40 percent, or 60 million people, are completely dependent on agriculture. Many people are landless or have less than an acre or half an acre to live on. It makes you wonder what they are surviving on.

Rice is the principal crop and, for those with very little land, the only crop they grow. Forty percent of children are malnourished, either because they don’t get enough calories or because they can’t develop healthily only eating rice.

Q.

How is climate change affecting the land, people and economy?

A.

Bangladesh sits at the end of the cone of the Bay of Bengal. The country is infamous for natural disasters. Every year there are typhoons. The coastal zones routinely get washed away, and the farmland is destroyed: people lose animals, crops, everything they have. They are very exposed: most of the land is flat and just above sea level, every storm sweeps across the country without any obstacles, and tidal surges pound the coast.

Fishermen begin their work at dawn in Dhopadanga Boar, Bangladesh.
©IFAD/Alexandra Boulat

If you go further north, there is an area in the northeast that is essentially a large depression in the land. When the monsoon season starts, the water comes down from the mountains and floods the whole area. It fills up with water and takes months to drain. Vast areas are underwater half the time, so farmers can’t go into their fields or grow anything then; they have to rely on something else for most of the year.

These things have always happened in Bangladesh, but with climate change it is expected that these flash floods will occur more frequently, and rainfall will be more intense and erratic. Farmers are already trying to adapt to these changes by sowing their rice earlier and using varieties that mature more quickly so they can get the harvest in before the rains come and they are left with nothing to eat or sell.

In the coastal areas, storms are expected to come earlier and be more frequent and severe. In the last two decades, 500,000 people have been killed in storms, and we should expect that this will increase.

And then of course, the sea level will rise, and the ocean will come in over what dikes have been built. It is very likely that about 30 percent of land in Bangladesh will frequently be underwater and the soil will be saturated with salt and useless. Many, many people will lose their farmland, crops and livestock and homes and become climate change refugees. Where do these people go then, when there is already not enough land in the country?

Q.

What are your thoughts on Rio as the conference approaches? Are you hopeful? Cynical?

A.

I am not cynical — there are too many cynics already, and how does that help?

But I do think it’s important that people act instead of just talking.
It’s really sad that there are still politicians and governments out there who don’t believe that climate change is fact. It’s very sad. I don’t know what their motivations are, but they should come to Bangladesh and meet the people who won’t have homes or land or any way of supporting their families.

“Many, many people will lose their farmland, crops and livestock and homes and become climate change refugees. Where do these people go then?”

— Thomas Rath

If we don’t do anything, then the problem will come to us: these won’t be problems in our backyard, we will have climate refugees in our front yard, knocking on our door.

These people have a right to live, just as we who by chance were lucky enough to be born in comfortable North America and Europe have the right to live.

Rio was and is a fantastic thing, but we have no time to waste.

The planet cannot afford for us to continue the mistakes we made during industrialization: rooting our economy in fossil energy and polluting the atmosphere as much as possible. We need to help one another.

Q.

What are the biggest challenges for Bangladesh?

A.

It’s not enough for us to help people become better farmers; we need to help transition the economy to something that does not depend on the availability of land. I know farmers who grow rice before the monsoon season and then, when the rains come, they stock their flooded fields with fish fingerlings and crabs and sell these in Dhaka. It is a strange sort of crop rotation, but it works in some areas.

Agriculture will still be a very important sector in Bangladesh — it has to be, given so much food insecurity. But food insecurity can only be tackled by sufficient food production, and expanding agriculture — livestock, rice cultivation — contributes to climate change, which in turn leads to greater food insecurity through flooding, etc.

We need to find ways to help countries all over Asia to reduce carbon dioxide emissions while at the same time producing enough food to feed their people.

Other lives: women build better roads

One of the exciting things about training that cuts across divisions is that you get to learn stuff from colleagues with very different experiences of IFAD’s work. The gender training that’s been running this week was an excellent opportunity for this because the sessions I attended involved a lot of group work and discussion, as well as giving guidance and insights on the challenging business of gender mainstreaming.

Women and men work together on a
 building in a village market in Bangladesh

That’s how I learnt that poor women in isolated areas in rural Bangladesh build better roads than outside contractors. And I admit that I was pretty surprised. I was ready to think that this was yet another example of women being exploited and doing most of the work for the least of the money.

But Monica Romano, who knows the project and others like it, explained to us that road-building and other community infrastructure works are an effective way of enabling very poor women to earn sorely-needed income. Many of them head households without the support of a man. Food and cash are in very short supply and opportunities to earn money are practically non-existent.

The Haor Infrastructure and Livelihood Improvement Project will be building about 350 km of roads and developing 78 village markets. About 80% of the labourers are set to be women.

Workers are employed through Labour Contracting Societies, which give priority to poor women and men. In the Haor project, about 960 such societies are expected to have about 29,000 members. The project will generate about 2.25 million days of labour.

Monica explained that employing a majority of local women to construct the roads also makes good sense. Experience in other projects has shown that the roads they build are more resistant and better constructed than those built by outsiders with no personal investment in connecting the community to the outside world.

This may also be because lack of roads limits women’s lives more than it does men’s. They find it more difficult to travel by boat when the flood waters are high, or to walk along muddy tracks. If the women are able to save some of their earnings, they will also be encouraged to invest in micro enterprises and to use the roads they’ve built to take their goods to market.

It would be great to hear from others who attended the gender training about what they took away. I hope it was the beginning of an ongoing conversation throughout the house about how to make sure that a full half of the 80 million people we aim to reach during IFAD9 are women. Oh yes.

Just released for Rio+20: Video documentary on food challenges in Bangladesh, Chad and Ethiopia

Written by James Heer

In the context of the upcoming United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development (Rio+20) in June 2012, the Rome-based UN agencies released a new Hungry Planet episode, featuring solutions that work to increase food production and feed the expected 9.3 billion people by 2050.

The special Rio+20 episode of Hungry Planet takes us from Bangladesh, where rising sea levels and increasingly severe storms threaten millions of farmers living along the country's southern coast, to Chad, where unpredictable weather patterns fuel hunger and malnutrition, and finally Ethiopia, where distribution of high yield root and tuber varieties help farmers increase production in times of drought.



Hungry Planet is a web-based television series about global food issues and agricultural development. Each episode takes viewers to remote locations around the world and tells the stories of real people - farmers struggling to increase food yields while adapting to climate change, families on the run fleeing conflict and famine, scientists and aid workers on the frontlines searching for solutions that will ensure there’s enough food to feed a hungry planet now and in the future. Stories are produced by the United Nation’s three food agencies – the World Food Programme (WFP), the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), and the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD).

The next episode will be released in early June 2012. Stay tuned.

Find out more about how IFAD is involved in Rio+20.

For more Hungry Planet episodes, check IFAD’s Video Archive.

UK’s first Bangladesh Expo to boost and encourage business links

The first ever Destination Bangladesh Trade Show will take place at Canary Wharf on 16th-17th September 2011.

The event, organised by media production company Mahua Events, has already won the support of the UK’s first Bangladeshi MP, Rushanara Ali, who represents Bethnal Green and Bow.

Destination Bangladesh Expo 2011, which is expected to attract 5,000 visitors, intends to create an

What do numbers tell us?

Training and skills development play a key role in many sectors but when it comes to the difference that capacity-building, agricultural education, vocational training and skills development can make in offering a route out of poverty to rural poor people the debate becomes more serious. Why? “Today, about 34 per cent of the total rural population of developing countries is classified as extremely poor…” and agricultural education is 1 of the 6 policy and institutional measures “ that governments can take to provide an enabling framework for sustainable agricultural intensification “ …… agricultural education is “fundamental to enable women, men, young people and children to develop the skills they need to take advantage of new economic opportunities (source IFAD RPR 2011)” . In this context, it is extremely important for IFAD to assess the role and scope of capacity building, training and skills development in IFAD portfolio. The 2 days international consultation "Skills development for poverty alleviation: sharing IFAD experiences in technical and vocational skills development”that took place in IFAD on 22 and 23 June was an opportunity to:

• understand the potential of training in IFAD supported projects
• discuss the results achieved in the framework of the Initiative to Mainstream Initiative (IMI - a DFID supported initiative to promote innovations
• identify successful and innovative training approaches in IFAD supported projects (six field studies conducted in on-going IFAD projects in Bangladesh, Colombia, Ghana, Madagascar, Rwanda and Sudan were presented), and
• pave the way to strengthen the impact of training on poor rural communities in order to give the rural poor the individual and collective capabilities to overcome poverty.

In terms of numbers, results are impressive! Since 2005, more than 4.3 million people have been trained (40% on agricultural technologies and production and 23% on enterprise development and employment) through IFAD programmes. But numbers, as rightly pointed out by panellists at the international consultation, need to be interrogated to give a sense of the impact of the 4.3 million trainings delivered on the lives of those people in terms of empowerment. Unfortunately data is not collected systematically and consistently; participants agreed that more efforts should be made to improve the quality of the data collected in order to answer crucial questions such as: Who are the people trained; are they men, youths or women? and most importantly are they the rural poor we need to reach? What is the use of these trainings? Did the trainings make any difference to the quality of life of the trainees?

Definitively, this is the experience of the women trained in the context of Gash Sustainable Livelihoods Regeneration Project (GSLRP) in Sudan . For them “the training on nutrition, food processing and home economics was the first opportunity to socialize and acquire new skills, said Aisha Sheik GSLRP Programme Officers in Sudan.

Kudos to GSLRP project for:

• campaigning for women’s participation in training
• influencing men and having men support the participation of women in training (it wasn’t easy…it took 2 years but they did it!!)
• overcoming barriers like the lack of venues where women could be trained
• optimizing the techniques acquired by those who benefitted from the project training on brick making and having them build the training venues with green bricks
• sharing with us during the conference the thoughts and the feedback of the beneficiaries of the training. Their words:

"Before the training, we were just sitting in the house, meetings have broadened our thinking."

"We learned how to speak Arabic and how to pray and cite the Koran"

"Before the training, our meals were sorghum porridge or Kasha, now we cook vegetables and meat; prepare special meals for children and pregnant women."

“Before we did not care when the vaccination team came for our children, now we all go out and know how important it is”

IFAD and the Netherlands take on climate change in Bangladesh

With Copenhagen in mind, I am writing this post from a remote island in the Bay of Bengal, in the middle of the major cyclone corridor off southern Bangladesh. This is the extreme frontline in the battle Bangladesh faces against climate change. Islands (called "chars" in Bengali) such as these could be the first casualties from sea level rise. Some of these chars are already largely submerged at high tide. Others, as shown in this photo, are barely above sea level.

Who on earth would choose to live in a place like this? And yet, unbelievably, thousands of the poorest Bangladeshi's live on these coastal chars. Most have nowhere else to live. Many of their ramshackle homes get flooded on a daily basis. The number one cause of death of children in these areas is drowning. There is no government presence, no health care, no schools. The land is saline, so crops barely survive. People have no legal title to the land, and are prone to robbery and extortion by powerful gangs that control these areas. Women are particularly vulnerable and rape is common. Its really got to be the most challenging place I have worked in my 13 years at IFAD.

This desperate area is the location of IFAD's newest project in Bangladesh, a project that will be jointly funded by IFAD and the Netherlands. It will be the biggest ever IFAD initiated project in Bangladesh and has been a massive challenge to design. The Netherlands contributed USD 380,000 to the design process while IFAD contributed USD 100,000. This large design budget enabled complex engineering feasibility studies to be funded, as well as the usual formulation and appraisal missions. IFAD was given the responsibility to lead the entire design process and to identify and manage the design consultants.

So what is going to be funded? Firstly, large areas of land will be protected from sea level rise and flooding by high embankments. Cyclone shelters will be built to protect the local populations from extreme storm surges. The land will be surveyed and each landless settler household will be given secure land title to a 1.5 acre plot of land. Finally, to enable agriculture, salt will be removed from the soil by flushing, and adaptive research on salt tolerant varieties will be funded.

Tomorrow i'm off back to Dhaka to write the aide memoire for the wrap-up meeting next week. Then back to Rome on the 18th.

Nigel Brett, CPM Bangladesh.