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Sunday, January 31, 2010

Re: [ALOCHONA] Re: BSF kills 5 on three borders in a week



As Bangladesh has become an integral part of India, I don't think we can make it an issue.
Our so-called government is silent over killing of its own citizens. Because they does not want
the Boss to be angry.
 
SH


From: Jamil Ahmed <jamil_dhaka@yahoo.com>
To: alochona@yahoogroups.com
Sent: Sat, January 30, 2010 2:57:24 PM
Subject: Re: [ALOCHONA] Re: BSF kills 5 on three borders in a week

 



Poor people has no value, specially in Bangladesh.
daily death toll just in our road system is just unacceptable.
Killing by Indian force or our police/RAB is also an issue.
Even Killers of Sk.Mujib got a day in our court.

--- On Sat, 1/30/10, qrahman@netscape. net <qrahman@netscape. net> wrote:

From: qrahman@netscape. net <qrahman@netscape. net>
Subject: Re: [ALOCHONA] Re: BSF kills 5 on three borders in a week
To: alochona@yahoogroup s.com
Date: Saturday, January 30, 2010, 7:01 AM

Ezaz bhai,
Could not said it better.
Peace
-Quazi


-----Original Message-----
From: ezajur <Ezajur@yahoo. com>
To: alochona@yahoogroup s.com
Sent: Thu, 28 Jan 2010 12:51:27 -0000
Subject: [ALOCHONA] Re: BSF kills 5 on three borders in a week

 
This is not an issue to most Bangladeshis. We are a magnanimous and
sophisticated nation where a dozen innocent and poor people shot dead
at the border is well understood to be necessary for regioanl feng
shui. We are more concerned about who was wrong or right in the 1970s.

Let us all join hands next time a poor farmer is shot dead and sing
with tears in our eyes,,, "Ami Bangla Gaan Gai..."

Freakin even Kentucky Fried Chicken has billboards advertising our war
of independence.

Buy "Buriganga Toilet Paper" - desh ebong manusher kolyane.

Ezajur Rahman

--- In alochona@yahoogroup s.com, Isha Khan &lt;bdmailer@ ...&gt; wrote:
&gt;
&gt; *BSF kills 5 on three borders in a week*
&gt;
&gt;
&gt; Five Bangladeshis were killed by Indian Border Security Force
(BSF) in last
&gt; one week on Jessore, Satkhira and Meherpur borders.
&gt;
&gt; Bangladesh Human Rights Implementation Committee (BHRIC) has
expressed grave
&gt; concern at the killings of Bangladeshis by Indian Border guards on
borders
&gt; of the south-western region of the country.According to BHRIC
sources, a
&gt; cattle trader named Hazrat Ali, 32, was beaten to death by BSF on
Goga
&gt; border of Benapole on January 9. Bongaon police recovered the body
and later
&gt; sent it to hospital morgue for autopsy.
&gt;
&gt; On January 12, another cattle trader, Alauddin alias Ala, 30, was
gunned
&gt; down by BSF at Daulatpur frontier of Benapole.The BSF men took
away body and
&gt; returned it on January 13. Ala was son of Akbar Ali of Goirha
village under
&gt; Benapole Police Station of Jessore district.A young man named
Shafiqul Islam
&gt; Bhulu, 30, was tortured to death by BSF on Uksha border under
Kaliganj
&gt; upazila of Satkhira district on January 13.Kaliganj police
recovered the
&gt; body and later sent it to Satkhira Sadar Hospital morgue for
autopsy.
&gt;
&gt; On the night of January 15, BSF shot dead Shahidul Alam, 28, at
Kazipur
&gt; frontier under Gangni upazila of Meherpur district. BSF took away
the body
&gt; and returned it after a flag meeting on January 16.On January 16,
an
&gt; unidentified Bangladeshi was tortured to death by the Indian
border guards
&gt; on Sharsha border of Jessore district. Sharsha police recovered
his body
&gt; from near border pillar no 26.
&gt;
&gt; http://www.thedaily star.net/ story.php? nid=122588
&gt;


             




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Re: [ALOCHONA] Office of attorney general undermines rule of law, HC



High and Supreme Court judges and the Chief Justice are in his pocket. He dictate them what to do. Before any judgement of any sensitive cases, he actually writes the judgement and passes on to the judges. The judges only reads the pre-written judgments. The Carrot of Ombudsman is hanging before the the Chief Justice. So everytime, he looks at that juicy carrot and does whatever His Highness Attorney General desires.
 
We don't need a coward Chief Justice like Mr Tofazzal Hussain. We need one Cheif Justice Mr Iftekhar Choudry of Pakistan.
SH

From: Isha Khan <bdmailer@gmail.com>
To: dhakamails@yahoogroups.com
Sent: Sat, January 30, 2010 9:29:09 PM
Subject: [ALOCHONA] Office of attorney general undermines rule of law, HC

 

Editorial
Office of attorney general undermines rule of law, HC

THE letter issued by the attorney general's office to the prisons department in the past week asking the latter to seek clearance from the former before releasing any convicts granted bail by the High Court is perhaps the most blatant move yet by the government to undermine not only the authority and independence of the highest judiciary but also the rule of law that it so tirelessly professes commitment to every now and then. According to a report front-paged in New Age on Saturday, the prisons department has already taken steps to ensure that the instruction is complied with and informed 59 prisons of the 'wish', so to speak, of the attorney general's office.

   The rationale for the letter issued by the advocate on record, as explained by the attorney general when talking to New Age on Friday, is as lame as it could be. 'The government,' he argued, 'in most cases, appeals against the High Court and gets the High Court orders halted… If the convicts are released from jail, the Appellate Division's order becomes a futile exercise.' He also claimed that 'sometimes some criminals make the way for their release by submitting forged documents of High Court orders.' First of all, application of law or compliance with an order of the apex court cannot, and must not, be consequent upon the convenience of the executive branch of the state. As and when the High Court grants bail to any convict, the prison authorities are bound to arrange for his or her release; if the government were to secure an Appellate Division stay on the order, it could very well have the convict arrested and imprisoned accordingly. Secondly, whether the bail order produced is forged or not is for the jail authorities to check and ascertain; its failure does not constitute a justification to defer execution of a court order, let alone necessitate clearance from the attorney general's office.
  
 Moreover, the Awami League-led government has thus far displayed an intriguing penchant for non-compliance with the High Court's order. A glaring example in this regard would be its failure to respond to the June 29, 2009 rule of the court asking the government to explain, within four weeks, why extrajudicial killings by members of the law enforcement agencies in the name of 'crossfire' and 'encounter' should not be declared illegal. In such circumstances, it would not perhaps be far-fetched to construe the latest move by the office of the attorney general, who is the top law officer of the government, as an attempt at encroaching upon the independence of the judiciary.
 
It could also be interpreted as the government's bid to establish the office of the attorney general as a supra-judicial body. In other words, the executive branch of the state could be viewed as trying to dictate the judiciary, which is in contravention with the constitutional decree that the state 'shall ensure the separation of the judiciary from the executive organs of the State'.
   
Overall, the government has not only undermined the concept of the rule of law but also sought to trespass into the High Court's jurisdiction, which is tantamount to contempt of court. We believe the apex court should, and hope it would, issue a rule suo motto demanding an explanation from the office of the attorney general in particular and the government in general why they should not be held in contempt.
 



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[ALOCHONA] Climate change: Whispering from the Sunderbans




Figure: Global rise in temperature since 1860 (Boesch 2002)
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
Due to increased rate of emissions of greenhouse gases (carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide, ozone and chlorofluorocarbons) from different sources such as burning of fossil fuels, deforestation and other human activities, the rate of global temperature increase accelerated from +0.6°C over the past century to an equivalent rate of +1.0°C per century in the past two decades (Natural Resource Defence Council, USA 2006). Sea-level rise as a consequence of global warming is caused by increase in seawater temperatures resulting in thermal expansion of water and melting of glacier and polar iceberg (Kennedy et. al. 2002). The climate change has already affected the ecosystems of northern hemisphere including the coastal forests.

The out flow of water from Bangladesh is the third highest in the world, next to the Amazonia and Congo basin. Major rivers of Bangladesh flow from north to south, silting up the mangroves delta and draining into the Bay of Bengal. The mangroves delta is also a region of transition between the freshwater of the rivers originating from the Ganges and the saline water of the Bay of Bengal. The ecosystems as well as the luxuriant biodiversity of Sunderbans have strong interactions with marine environments. The Sunderbans is considered as the largest single halophytic mangroves unit in the world. It has been declared as a UNESCO World Heritage Site and Ramsar Site. The environmental parameters with the direct influences on Sunderbans in terms of global climate change are sea-level rise, natural calamities like cyclones, temperature rising, salinity and drought. The structure and composition of Sunderbans may undergo major change, depending on the severity of human disturbances and predicted climate change.

The vegetation of the Sundarbans differs greatly from other non-deltaic mangroves and upland forests. It is a tropical moist forest having a mosaic pattern of old growth and successional vegetations. A total of 334 plant species were recorded in 1903 (Prain 1903). Sundari and Gewa are the dominant species throughout the old growth forests with uneven distributions of Dhundul and Kankara. Sometimes successional forests are dominated by Keora, aquatic plants and dune vegetation. There are strong correlations among vegetations, salinity, freshwater flushing, silting, inundation and mudflat accretion. Golpata, Hantol and Goran are also indicator plant species of these ecosystems.

A total number of 375 species of birds, 55 species of mammals, 83 species of reptiles and amphibians, 150 species of fish, 50 species of shrimp and other invertebrates were recorded in the Sundarbans (The Daily Star 2009). Hog deer, water buffalo, swamp deer, Javan rhinoceros, single horned rhinoceros and the mugger crocodile became extinct at the beginning of the last century. It is the paradise of eponymous Royal Bengal tiger, salt water crocodile and spotted deer. Besides, dolphins, rhesus monkey, snakes, river terrapin, forest owl, sea eagle, Indian flap-shelled turtle, peacock soft-shelled turtle, swamp partridge, trogon, ground thrush, yellow monitor, water monitor, Indian python, fishing cats, macaques, forest wagtail, wild boar, green frog, grey mongoose, scarlet minivet, fox, ring lizard, jungle cat, flying fox, pangolin, pigmy woodpecker, brown wing kingfisher, racket tailed drongo, chital and other threatened species live in the Sundarbans.

Sea level rise
One-metre rise of sea level will destroy the whole ecosystem of Sunderbans. Dune vegetation will be submerged under water. The pioneer or indicator species Sundari will be replaced by Goran and Gewa species, which are less valuable than Sundari. All ground animals will lose their habitats. Herbivorous animals like deer, monkey and wild boar will face shortage of food. Carnivorous animals like tigers and fishing cats will face the same problem due to lack of herbivorous animals in the forest. Marine turtles, crabs, shrimps, crocodiles, frogs, snakes, fresh water fishes and dolphins will lose their breeding grounds and habitat as well. The impacts of different rate of sea level rise on Sunderbans can be projected by the study of Clough (1994).

(a) Low level rise: The old growth and successional forests will be able to keep pace with a sea level rise of 8-9cm/100 years. Few species will be highly vulnerable and many species will be threatened on islands.

(b) Medium level rise: Sunderbans will be under stress, especially islands with a sea level rise of 9-12cm/100 years. A good number of species will be vulnerable and maximum species on islands will face high risk of extinction.

(c) High level rise: Sunderbans will be squeezed with a sea level rise of above 12cm/100 years. Loss of species will occur in short period of time on islands.

Storminess
There has been a noticeable change, almost 26 percent over past 120 years, in the frequency of cyclones in the Bay of Bengal, which may be increased further with the intensifying of El Nino in the upcoming days. Four disastrous cyclones originated in the Bay of Bengal since 2006 -- Sidr, Nargis, Bijli and Aila. Cyclones impact Sunderbans through three primary mechanisms: wind damage, storm surge, and sedimentation. The highly affected areas will become unsuitable for habitation till 2020. Most of the inhabitants will be climate refugees with the repetition of such cyclones. Strong winds uproot, topple stems, break off trunks and defoliate the canopy. Taller stems are uprooted and knocked over when a storm ashore comes. Sediments carried by storm surges are deposited on the forest floor as the surge recedes, cause plants mortality by interfering with root and soil gas exchange, leading to eventual death of the plants. Storm surges reduce the viability of seeds, seedling germination and seedling recruitment. The recovery of forest dynamics from cyclone damage can be altered by other kinds of changes to the landscape. Many exotic plant species have the ability to rapidly colonize disturbed areas, and out-compete slower-growing native trees and plant.

These cyclones do not affect the Royal Bengal tigers too much as they can swim a long distance. But the problem is that they may lose bearing. When they do not know in which direction they have to move, they may die due to exhaustion. Strong wind destroys honey bee colonies causing high mortality. Coral reefs, woodpecker, sea turtles and parrots are vulnerable to cyclones. The arboreal monkey and lizards face shortage of foods.

Coral reefs are hit hard, fractured, and sponges and sea fans are ripped from their bases. Branching corals are broken and transported over the reef top. Dunes and beaches are washed away, and large areas completely submerged. Fish dies when the decay of foliage stripped from trees lower oxygen levels in the water. Cyclones have heavier impact on wetlands and the organisms that depend on them. Ground birds are severely affected by losing their habitats, nesting and breeding sites.

Salinity
Sunderbans is the transitional zone between freshwater supplied by rivers and saline water pushed by the Bay of Bengal. Sundari, the pioneer tree species will suffer from 'Top dyeing' disease with the increase of salinity. Salinity increases the tree mortality rate by reducing the production of new leaves, leaf longevity and the leaf area (Suárez and Medina, 2005). Net photosynthesis rate, stomata conductance and transpiration rate of leaves decrease with the increase of salt concentration (Yan and Guizhu, 2007). It is believed that Royal Bengal Tigers are suffering from various diseases by drinking saline water and their normal behaviour is also being changed. Aquatic organisms will migrate inward. Many fish species and other crustaceans utilize fresh water for spawning and juvenile feeding. The Hilsa needs less salinity to lay their eggs and enter various creeks in search of sweet water. The hatchlings move towards the sea where they attain adulthood, before returning to the rivers. Migration of fish species will have an adverse effect on the economy of the country.

How to combat: Some suggestions
* Designing and establishing sea-level / climate modelling network

* Establishing databases and information systems

* Data collection of Sundarbans' resources and their uses

* Integrated coastal and marine management

* Monitoring the impact of climate change on coral reef, Royal Bengal Tiger, crocodiles and Sundari tree

* Coastal vulnerability and risk assessment

* Economic valuation of Sundarbans' resources

* Improving catchment management

* Facilitating natural regeneration and natural succession of native tree species

* Increasing waterfront setbacks in beach front areas

* Education on climate change and emergency preparedness needs to take place at all levels by incorporating it into education curricula

* Creating public awareness through mass media

* Developing coastal infrastructure

* Initiating community based coastal forestation

* Protecting existing mangroves against encroachment and cutting

* Afforestation and reforestation by salt tolerant species

* Initiating ex-situ conservation of rare species

* Establishing mechanisms to promote carbon uptake

* Raising funds for conservation programme

* Strict control of Tigers' poaching

Dr. Md. Mizanur Rahman is a biodiversity specialist, NDC, Jhalakathi Colloectorate e-mail: mizan_peroj@yahoo.com


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[ALOCHONA] Recruitment trade in Health Ministry



Recruitment trade in Health Ministry
 


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[ALOCHONA] Jubo League /Chatra League



Jubo League /Chatra League
 
 
 
 


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[ALOCHONA] Amrao Manush – the Pavement Dwellers of Dhaka



Amrao Manush – the Pavement Dwellers of Dhaka
Bangladesh: 'If we fall asleep the gangs steal our children...'
Lucy Adams
Published on 30 Jan 2010
The Herald, Scotland
http://www.heraldscotland.com/news/world-news/bangladesh-if-we-fall-asleep-the-gangs-steal-our-children-1.1002578

Smog shrouds the human shadows congregating beneath the wide arc of Bangladesh's national football stadium.

View the slideshow here:
http://www2.newsquest.co.uk/scotland/pdf/Slideshows/300110bangladesh/index.html

 
Car horns blast in the hazy darkness. It is 10pm. Babu is ­waiting to make his bed. He points to the bare concrete beneath the stadium's outer terraces where distorted, headless-looking bodies lie curled in blankets. There are no walls, no doors.

They say my son has been sold abroad...some children are stolen for the sex trade and others for their body parts. Sufia Begum
"This is where I sleep," he says quietly in Bengali.

Next to Babu's bed, a fetid dark liquid ­scattered with scraps of litter oozes from cracks in the road. To use the public toilets, they have to pay – so most of these children squat in the open.

First one floodlight goes out, then another. Only now is it safe for Babu to unfurl the dusty sheets that make his home. To lie down with the lights on makes a police beating almost inevitable. It is winter, and people are lying close together for warmth and because of the lack of space, bodies sprawled, limbs intertwining like a scene from a forensic snapshot of genocide. Nearby, one of Babu's friends remains upright, on lookout duty for the first part of the night.

"Since I was kidnapped, my friends and I take it in turns to stay awake and keep watch," he says. "We have a rota. We can't all sleep at once in case the police come early or the gangs try to steal someone."

Babu is four years old. He sleeps here every night and wakes with the 5.30am call to prayer of the nearby mosque. Three months ago he was kidnapped in the middle of the night and taken across the city by a man he had never seen before. Locked in a room for three days with little food or water, he was then sold for 4000 taka (about £35).

"He was selling me to another person when I started screaming and crying and a policeman came and caught him," he says. "I was so very afraid. The policeman beat the man and then asked me where I stayed."

Babu is one of thousands of permanent pavement dwellers in Dhaka, the capital of Bangladesh and the world's most densely populated city. Official figures put the ­population at 14 million: on top of that, however, it is ­estimated that there are between 20,000 and 50,000 men, women and children living on the streets. Most are environmental refugees who have fled flooding in outlying parts of the country. When they arrive, they find themselves prey to other dangers.

As Babu tries to rest, a crowd gathers and a piercing wail begins. A distraught woman emerges from the darkness, a baby clutched to her chest, ­pleading for help and tugging at the clothes of those around her. "My daughter has gone," she cries. "I have lost my five-year-old girl. Who has taken her? Have you seen her?" The crowd surges but the woman runs back into the night. We cannot find her. The ­onlookers seem unaffected. They say children regularly go missing.

Unicef, the United Nations Children's Fund, estimates that 400 women and children fall victim to trafficking in Bangladesh each month. Most are between the ages of 12 and 16 and are forced to work in the sex industry. Some become domestic slaves, and the boys are often taken to the Middle East and forced to be camel jockeys.

The annual report of the Pakistan-based organisation Lawyers For Human Rights And Legal Aid revealed that 4500 Bangladeshi girls are sold in Pakistan in a single year.

The pavement dwellers claim children are sometimes also stolen by religious cults for rituals and sacrifices and a report by the international organisation Ecpat (End Child Prostitution, Child Pornography and Trafficking of Children for Sexual Purposes) says they are sold for their organs and body parts, a claim backed by Unicef's research.

The Poppy Project, a London-based charity that supports the female victims of trafficking in the UK, has to date helped 11 Bangladeshi women. Trafficked children have also been identified in Britain.

Parents try to protect their children as well as they can. Mothers tie their toddlers to their bodies with their saris – little deterrent to the organised criminal gangs, known as mustans. One woman uses a padlock and chain.

Babu has no-one to tie himself to. His mother died of rabies and his father of asthma. Dhaka is one of the world's most polluted cities and deaths from respiratory disease are particularly common on the street. The smog runs the length and breadth of the city, every road clogged with rickshaws, buses and cars. It chokes out the sun and blurs the sunset as yellow fog turns to grey. The pollution, the lack of clean water and the problems people have accessing even rudimentary medical care mean that skin disease, bronchitis and tuberculosis are commonplace.

The only respite from the noise and filth is from 9am to 5pm, when Babu can access one of Concern Worldwide's nine day-centres across the city. The centres support more than 1000 pavement dwellers each day, offering a place for them to rest, wash and cook. Children under five are given nursery education and lunch, allowing their parents to work.

The centres also run savings schemes and encourage young people into vocational training courses to offer them an escape from the streets. The project is called Amrao Manush, meaning "we are people too" in Bengali – a name devised by the pavement dwellers themselves. This year Concern hopes to raise enough money to open night shelters for the most vulnerable, including pregnant women and children. It is at night that the children are normally stolen.

Sufia Begum's son Shakil was taken seven months ago. He has not been seen since. "He was only four years old," she says, tightening her grip on her baby daughter. "It was night and he said he was going to the toilet. He never came back. I ran around screaming, looking for him. I arranged for a big loudspeaker microphone and went all over the city crying his name.

"They say my son has been sold abroad. This happens often. Some children are stolen for the sex trade and others for their body parts. I know that religious people steal children for sacrifices and rituals." She begins to sob. "I still look, but do not know how to find him," she says.

Sufia is just 20, but looks far, far older. Like Babu, she was born on the pavement beneath the stadium's terraces. As with most of the women we meet, Sufia says that, when she went to the police to report her son's abduction, they demanded a home address and a bribe beyond her means. "The police said they would do nothing unless I gave them 5000 taka (£45)," she says. "All I had in savings was 500 taka (£4.50). Now I am afraid to sleep at night in case someone tries to steal my daughter. I am saving money but it is difficult. I just want somewhere safe for my children."

Sufia gets about 100 taka (70p) a day from begging. Like the majority of the pavement dwellers, she has few possessions and no identity card, nor any chance of obtaining one without a birth certificate or address. Fewer than 10% of children in Bangladesh are registered at birth. This, coupled with high levels of police corruption, compounds the vulnerability of the pavement dwellers. Officials speak about them as if they are not citizens, not even human. "So many people are totally without basic rights," says Nina Goswami, a human-rights advocate who works with Concern and other similar organisations. "We are trying to improve the police and change their behaviour, but it will not change in just one or two years. Their practice of asking for bribes is long established."

Women's standing is epitomised by the fact it is still legal and socially acceptable to beat one's wife. The Women And Children Repression Act of 2003 includes sections on abduction, rape and being forced into the sex trade. However, lawyers say there is a huge gap between legislation and reality. "Even when a new law is passed, no-one is told," says Goswami. "People don't know what their rights are, even if they could pursue them. Our constitution says men and women are equal but in reality that is not the case. Some of the laws we already have are good, but few know they exist and most people are terrified of the police."

The maximum punishment for rape is the death penalty. For trafficking it is life in prison, but the cases do not make it to court. "There is a programme of legal aid but it hasn't worked," says Goswami. "The prosecution is meant to be funded by the government but they usually also demand money from the victim. It is illegal to rape a woman or child but the man will be so threatening that the woman will not come forward. Even if she does it is usually settled out of court with a fine. Only about 10% of the women who come forward would ever go to court."

Ms Goswami works with some of Dhaka's four million slum dwellers. They live in squalor – but pavement dwellers such as Sufia aspire to such a lifestyle. "I am saving for the future," she says, "when I hope to live under a roof in the slum."

Women's position as second-class citizens, along with the burden of having to pay a dowry to marry off daughters, makes girls particularly vulnerable to abuse. Research commissioned by Concern and conducted by local academics found that almost half of the pavement dwellers cited environmental reasons and natural disasters as their primary reason for moving to Dhaka. A quarter cited poverty and a further 15% were motivated by family problems. Many of the women say they came to the city specifically to escape abusive stepmothers.

Shuvashish Karmakar, project officer with Amrao Manush, says this Cinderella phenomenon is particularly common in rural areas. "So much of it is to do with class and social standing," he explains. "A year ago, a new policy was introduced to try to reduce inequality and give women access to education. Even on the buses they found it hard to get a seat. Now there are nine seats out of 48 reserved for women. Some 75% of the people we support in the centres are women and children and most of them have been beaten by their partners. The government does not really do a great deal to tackle domestic abuse, and although we have a female Prime ­Minister and female head of the opposition, the problems with social structures and traditional systems and beliefs still exist."

Unable to escape their social status with a glass slipper, many of the pavement women, most of whom leave home before they are 10 years old, attribute themselves the surname Begum, which means Queen. As with Sufia, Ratna claims the name as her own. Now 21, she still remembers the bus she took with her stepmother, the confusion and noise of the city compared to village life in Shirazgonj, 250km away, and the shock of being sold to a Dhaka brothel for about 3000 taka (£25). She was just six years old.

"It was terrifying," she says. "I cried and cried. Three men visited my room for sex at the same time. Two other girls and I plotted our escape. After three months we bribed the gatemen and we ran away. I have been living on the street since then."

Ratna, whose name means "ornaments", sleeps all day at one of the Concern centres in order to be vigilant on the streets at night. "I have to stay awake to ensure my nine-month-old son, Jannati, is safe," she says. "Two years ago my other baby boy was stolen. He was eight months old. I went straight to the police but they said I should not be a mother, that I should not have brought a child into the world because I am a pavement dweller. They beat me."

Ratna spends her nights beneath the wide, white arches of the railway station with hundreds of others. Passengers file past them as if they were invisible. Nearby, political posters and commercial advertisements offering eternal youth float in the acrid breeze like prayer flags. Barbed wire, freshly painted, surrounds the dwindling vegetation.

"Sleeping on the pavement, we face many problems," Ratna says. "The first is sexual abuse. I have been raped and there is little way of protecting yourself. The second is the police beatings and environmental problems like rain and flooding and sickness. The third, and worst, is our children being stolen. My husband is not here very often so he cannot protect us. We desperately need night centres so we can sleep in safety."

For most of those we speak to, the story is the same. A few metres away, in the shelter of a disused toilet block, Shati Begum lays out some newspapers and plastic on the ground before unfurling a colourful sari upon which she will sleep. Aged 25, she is seven months pregnant. Five months ago, her seven-year-old son was taken in the night. "We were sleeping next to each other," she says. "I was so tired because of the pregnancy. When I awoke, he was gone.

"I was crying and looking for him. I went to the police straight away with a photograph but they said they were not interested and wouldn't even write it down. They said that as a pavement person I had no identity and that they did not care. They said I needed an address and an identity card."

Shati still carries the photograph of her son but has given up hope of finding him. "Dhaka is a mega-city but its capacity is limited," says Afsana Akther of Dhaka City Corporation, which runs the city. "Children on the street are so vulnerable to sexual exploitation and trafficking. We can't cope with the numbers coming here. The government needs to take a stronger line and work with the international community to tackle trafficking."

Bangladesh is one of the poorest countries in the world, and almost 40% of its 156 million inhabitants live below the poverty line of one US dollar a day. A report in 2002 put the ­country's total number of street children at about two million across.

"These people have no stability," says Mostafa Quaium Khan, executive director of the Coalition For the Urban Poor in Dhaka. "They are floating without certainty, helpless, stricken by poverty and denied their minimum rights. They have come here often from terrible conditions but when they arrive they find they are even more helpless. Climate change is affecting Bangladesh very badly and millions more will be more seriously affected in future. Migration to the cities will increase and Dhaka will become unliveable, even in the next three to five years."

The city's population is growing by 9% a year, thousands being lured by the hope of work and safer housing – but there is nowhere for them when they arrive. Khan believes one answer is to get people into work. "Government needs to provide educational and vocational training and then see the ­benefits of these people working and paying tax," he says. "The social and economic development of our country is not possible if we exclude them. Those who have been on the pavement for a long time have so few aspirations that it is difficult. Surviving today is enough – but the children still believe things can change."

Rabeya Khatum has been a sex worker at the ferry port for the past three years but she still believes her life will improve. Aged 14, her street name is Smriti. Tonight she will sleep on the jetty at Sadargat where people are queuing for ferry tickets amid piles of green coconuts, spluttering engines and ringing rickshaw bells. Putrefied fish and pieces of polystyrene shift back and forth on the shoreline. "I do not want to do this work, and in February I'm starting a vocational sewing course," says Khatum, smiling. "The Concern project gives us 50 taka a day while training so we have enough money for food. I have already saved 1060 taka with the Concern savings account. I plan to save enough to buy a sewing machine and rent a house so I can start my own business. I do not want to do the type of work I have been doing."

Rabeya was one when her mother died, and her stepmother hit her regularly. Aged six, she was beaten so badly that she was unconscious for two days. "The villagers encouraged me to run away because it was so bad, but I was naive," she says. On the way to the ferry, she explains, she was duped by the kindness of strangers, dragged into the jungle and gang-raped by a group of boys. "They beat to death the one boy who pleaded with them to let me go," she says. Rescued by a farmer, she escaped to Dhaka and tried to work as a domestic servant, but struggled to earn enough to eat. Starving, prostitution seemed the only option – but she still dreams of having her own roof and business.

Babu, too, has dreams. Currently he survives by begging. The pavement dwellers say that being particularly young or having scars or deformities helps, as you earn more.

On a good day he makes the equivalent of 45p – enough for two meals. He likes to play hide and seek with his friends – and football too, which he tells me he loves. Despite living beneath the stadium, neither he nor his friends even own a ball. His dream is to be a pilot. "And one day," he says before lying down to sleep, "I would like a roof."



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[ALOCHONA] A fascinating interview with Meraj Khan (ZABhutto's PPP Comrade) on Bangladesh & Pakistan



Najam Sethi interviews Meraj Muhammad Khan. http://pkpolitics.com/2010/01/27/najam-sethi-special-27-january-2010/

 

Meraj Muhammad Khan was very close to Bhutto and gives a lot of unknown inside information about Bangladesh and many other things. Najam Sethi the former editor of Lahore's  Daily Times.

 

I hope you guys can understand urdu. It is fascinating stuff!!!!

 

 

 

Najam Sethi interviews Mairaj Muhammad Khan

 

Meraj Muhammad Khan is a political leader in Pakistan. A founding member of the Pakistan Peoples Party of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto he served as Federal Minister for Manpower in the first PPP government (1972-1977), falling out with Bhutto in 1975 he was arrested and imprisoned in solitary confinement till his release in 1977. He later joined the Movement for Restoration of Democracy and was a prominent democratic activist and leftist leader in the 1980s.

 

Meraj Muhammad Khan joined Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf headed by Imran Khan in 1998 but resigned from the party in 2003 citing differences with Khan. He then joined Mazdoor Kissan Party which later merged with Communist Party of Pakistan to form Communist Mazdoor Kissan Party.



 


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[ALOCHONA] The History of Famine - David Rieff (including the Bengal Famines)



A good discussion on the Great Bengal Famine!!!

 

 

The End of Hunger?

David Rieff

January 2, 2010

The New Republic

http://www.tnr.com/article/world/the-end-hunger?page=0,0

 

Famine: A Short History

By Cormac Ó Gráda

(Princeton University Press, 327 pp., $27.95)

 

David Rieff is the author of eight books including A Bed for the Night: Humanitarianism in Crisis.

 

The earliest recorded famines, according to Cormac Ó Gráda in his brief but masterful book, are mentioned on Egyptian stelae from the third millennium B.C.E. In that time--and to an extent, even today, above the Aswan dam in Sudan--farmers along the Nile were dependent on the river flooding to irrigate their fields. But one flood out of five, Ó Gráda tells us, was either too high or too low. The result was often starvation. The stelae commemorate the philanthropy of the aristocracy in providing food to the hungry. Other records of famine in the ancient world can be found in texts as various as Gilgamesh, the Joseph narrative in Genesis, Nehemiah, Cicero, and the Book of Revelation, in which the figure of famine is the third of the four horsemen of the apocalypse.

 

Leave Gilgamesh out of it. We now know enough about the history of famine for Ó Gráda to state confidently that the common denominator in most of the worst famines on record has been rain--too much of it or too little of it; while in some instances the cause seems to have been volcanic eruptions. The great famine that afflicted most of northern Europe between 1315 and 1322, from Ireland through Wales, England, and France, to Scandinavia and western Poland, was the result of heavy rains, flooding, and abnormally cold weather--the beginning of what is now known as the "Little Ice Age" in medieval Europe. The historian William Chester Jordan, who has written the definitive book on the subject, cautions that estimates of how many people died are hard to assess, but it seems that somewhere between one-third and one-fifth of the population perished of either hunger or disease.

 

A century earlier, in 1229, the Kangi famine in Japan--the result, it is generally thought, of volcanic activity and unseasonably damp weather--killed 20 percent of the population in many districts. More than a century later, in 1454, sixty-five years before Cortés's arrival, the so-called "famine of One Rabbit" in Mexico ("One Rabbit" being the name of the first year of the fifty-two-year Aztec calendar cycle) took place after a severe drought. And while Ó Gráda is guardedly skeptical of the claim made first by Thomas Malthus in his Essay on Population (and seconded, in the scholarship of our time, by Fernand Braudel and his followers) that famines were a common occurrence in history, the first table in his book, which sets out estimated death tolls from what he refers to as "selected famines," gives a very grim picture of the frequency of this disaster and its consequences. It lists an excess mortality of 1.5 million, and a death rate of 7 percent, for France in 1693 and 1694; 300,000 dead, and a 13 percent death rate, for Ireland in 1740 and 1741 (more than one hundred years before the potato famine); and nine and a half to thirteen million dead and a 3 percent death rate for China between 1877 and 1879. Elsewhere he speaks of the Brazilian Grande Seca of the same year causing half a million deaths, and of literally dozens of other famines occurring century in and century out, throughout the world.

 

Ó Gráda has a deeper quarrel with Malthus, which is to challenge the father of modern demography's fundamental claim that famine "seems to be the last, most dreadful resource of nature," and that "the power of population is so superior to the power in the earth to provide subsistence for man, that premature death must in some shape or other visit the human race." This may seem to make intuitive sense, and doubtless the survival of the Malthusian paradigm owes much to this impression. The problem is that Malthus was wrong. As Ó Gráda notes with characteristic understatement, "elementary demographic arithmetic argues against famines being as severe a demographic corrective as Malthus and others have suggested." If famines had really been as frequent as Malthus and his inheritors argued, it would have been impossible to sustain populations, let alone for them to grow. He is suitably cautious about how far the historical record before the seventeenth century can be trusted, but still Ó Gráda is willing to put his money on famines having been "less common in the past than claimed by Malthus or Braudel."

 

This is not to say that Ó Gráda is trying to prettify the long picture, and to underestimate how central, and how convulsive, famine has been to the human experience. Based on his account, it is hard not to conclude that, in terms of proportion of population killed, famine has taken the lives of many more people throughout most of recorded history than war. The two are catastrophically interrelated, of course--as closely linked to humanity's detriment as, in Amartya Sen's seminal insight, democracy is linked to the avoidance of famine, even in periods of failed harvests. But wrong as Malthus may have been--at least so far--about whether population growth must inevitably outstrip the availability of the food needed for human survival, he had sound reasons, in 1798, to treat famine as principally a natural phenomenon linked to weather, rather than as a calamity fundamentally caused by war and ideology--a political calamity. Ó Gráda, with his typical fair-mindedness, goes to some lengths to demonstrate that Malthus may have under-emphasized the latter connection, but he certainly did not deny it.

 

O Gráda begins to emphasize the centrality of famine's political dimension once his discussion moves away from pre-nineteenthcentury famines to what might be called modern famines. The former, he insists, were mainly linked either to "extraordinary 'natural events'" or to "ecological shocks." In the latter, by contrast, the natural dimension more often than not played a subaltern role. As a result, while it seems doubtful that it was Ó Gráda's intention to defend Malthus, his account of "pre-modern" famines nonetheless seems to offer at least tacit support for some of Malthus's assumptions--as when, in a chapter called "Markets and Famines," Ó Gráda points out that Adam Smith in The Wealth of Nations (which was published in 1776, twenty-two years before Malthus's Essay on Population) got it wrong when, writing of the terrible famine in Bengal and Bihar in 1770, he attributed the cause principally to mistakes made by the East India Company. In reality the root cause was drought.

 

Famine is by no means Ó Gráda's only interest. Much of his writing has been on Irish economic history, including, in great depth, its twentieth-century history, not least as the author of the Oxford New Economic History of Ireland. His great book on the so-called potato famine--Black '47 and Beyond: The Great Irish Famine in History, Economy, and Memory--is a model of care and skepticism about sentimentalizing the past or indulging in nationalist cant, even as it is a harrowing account of an event that, as Ó Gráda puts it, "was much more murderous, relatively speaking, than most historical and most modern famines." In his conclusion to that book, Ó Gráda refers dismissively to "a continued desire in Ireland 'to remember things we never knew' and an eagerness in some quarters further afield, particularly in the United States, to invoke the famine as a means of stoking up old resentments." That said, the memory of the famine--Ó Gráda is absolutely right to emphasize that element in Black '47--played an important role in the shaping of Irish nationalism, just as the Great Bengal Famine of 1943 did in defining, if only dialectically, Indian nationalism. (The historian Jill Bender has even argued that there is a link between the earlier Indian famine of 1873–1874 and the development of nineteenth-century Irish parliamentary nationalism.)

 

Given the stance he took in this earlier book, it is hardly surprising that when Ó Gráda turns to the ideological and political dimensions of the cause of the famines, he is unwilling to endorse a reductive account that assigns the complete responsibility for nineteenthcentury famines to imperial policy. This view has its defenders, and has been expressed in subtle scholarly work by the geographer Michael Watts in his study of northern Nigeria. More recently, it has gained a currency it hardly deserves in Late Victorian Holocausts: El Niño Famines and the Making of the Third World, by Mike Davis, the self-described Marxistenvironmentalist who teaches creative writing at UC Riverside, and whose general approach might be summarized as Wallerstein for Dummies. Davis's basic argument is that the deliberate strategy of the British empire was to turn droughts into famines in order to drag the colonies into the world economic system. As Davis puts it, "the great Victorian famines were forcing houses and accelerators of the very socio-economic forces that ensured their occurrence in the first place."

 

This is progressive tripe, and woefully consistent with Davis's previous work, which has been remarkable for its blend of sentimentality about peasant arcadia, conspiracy mongering, and fantasies about the emancipatory potential of various urban jacqueries. (In his work on Los Angeles, Davis saw proto-revolutionary potential in the Crips and the Bloods.) Davis is emblematic of an influential strain in environmentalist thinking about agriculture, which insists, against most of the evidence and against common sense, that before the advent of modernity, imperial or otherwise, peasants possessed both the wisdom and the means to stave off famine. Before the dystopian advent of industrial agriculture, this argument runs, peasants had sustainable and effective systems of crop diversification and water-harvesting, and it was only when they were deprived of the capacity to deploy this knowledge that famine and misery became rampant. It is this arcadian fantasy that is as much at the heart of much of the current opposition to genetically engineered seeds as the entirely justifiable fear of agricultural multinationals owning patents to foods, the possibility that safeguards against health risks are insufficient, and the problem of whether poor farmers can ever sustainably afford GE seeds. People such as Davis write as if there were no famines before imperialism. They have misunderstood the history of famine, or chosen to misunderstand it.

 

The reality is that if there was a malign side to British imperial famine policy--and, though you wouldn't know it from Niall Ferguson and Adam Roberts and others, God knows there was!--it was a Malthusian malignity: the view that, as Malthus himself wrote, "gigantic inevitable famine ... with one mighty blow levels the population with the food of the world." Malthusianism provided a pseudo-scientific pretext--the great famine specialist Alex de Waal has called it "one of the most monstrous intellectual aberrations of all time"--for the British authorities to fail to aid the poor. But it was most emphatically not a charter to foment famine, as Davis claims.

 

What is true is that Malthusianism exerted a tremendous and pernicious influence on Victorian thinking in terms of its moral complacency about the suffering of the poor and of its mistaken analysis of why famines actually occur. In 1805, the East India Company appointed Malthus professor of political economy at the college that it maintained in Haileybury. His views, based less on his actual writings and more on what de Waal calls the "oral tradition" of Malthusianism, persisted until at least the early 1880s. Yet there was no conspiracy and no master plan, and by the 1870s British imperial policy was swinging strongly toward what de Waal, who is hardly known for his admiration for imperialism, calls in Famine Crimes--an essential book--"a commitment to employing the destitute and hungry." This changed analysis of the nature of famine and the responsibilities of government led first to the appointment of a Famine Commission and then to the Famine Codes of imperial India. As Sen has pointed out, these codes, modified and improved in a series of "Scarcity Manuals" issued after independence, remain at the root of the methodology currently being used effectively by the government of India to prevent famine.

 

De Waal actually goes further, arguing that "ceding an anti-famine political contract was the price paid by Britain for maintaining imperial rule in India." And he speculates that the failure of the colonial government to live up to this contract during the Great Bengal Famine of 1943 contributed powerfully to the further mobilization of anti-colonial sentiment in India. As de Waal puts it, "this was a vindication of the Famine Commissioners' insight that effective famine prevention would put a brake on anti-British sentiment."

 

O Gráda hardly holds European domination blameless. His general view seems to be that, to the extent we are in a position to know, pre-nineteenth-century famines were principally the result of natural phenomena, but that subsequently, even though natural factors were almost always part of the explanation, the most important causes have been policy failures, wars, or what he calls "the violence of governments." Ó Gráda looks at the three major famines that took place, and one that was averted, in Bengal since the mid-eighteenth century, and concludes (tentatively, because of the deficits in the data) that 1769–1770, which allegedly killed one third of the affected population, was the result of drought, and that 1873–1874 was prevented because of sound public policy, and that 1896–1897 took place despite it, and that the Great Bengal Famine of 1943 was due mainly to World War II, and partly to policy failure, and only slightly to a food shortfall.

 

The account in Ó Gráda's book of the link between colonialism and famine is admirably nuanced. "On balance," he writes, "the initial impact of colonial conquest and 'pacification' was almost certainly to increase famine mortality." Some of the examples he cites are Mexico in the 1520s, Ireland in the 1580s and 1650s, Namibia and Angola before 1920, the Xhosa lands in South Africa in the 1850s, and northern Nigeria in the second decade of the twentieth century.

 

That is the case for the anti-imperialist prosecution. In mitigation, Ó Gráda insists that colonialism's subsequent impact was less clear. "In the longer run," he writes, "although colonial rule may have eliminated or weakened traditional coping mechanisms, it meant better communications, integrated markets, and more effective public action, which together probably reduced famine mortality." And Ó Gráda points out that while "colonial exactions during World War I produced famine in several parts of Africa ... famines were almost certainly much fewer between the 1920s and the end of the colonial era than they had been before the post-1880s 'scramble for Africa.'"

 

Alex de Waal has significantly observed that, contrary to our present view, which firmly associates famine with sub-Saharan Africa, until the early 1970s famine was "virtually synonymous with one or other Asian country," and that "most modern famine theory and practice originate there." While Ó Gráda's scope is global, and he treats the Great Irish Famine and a number of African famines at length and in some detail, inevitably the historical material in his book is centered on China and India. For Ó Gráda, the Bengal Famine of 1943 is the "paradigmatic disaster." He can say this so confidently less because of its magnitude (while it killed around two million people by most estimates, its toll was proportionally lower than the Irish famine of 1847, and lower in absolute numbers than the famines in the Soviet Union in both 1921–1922 and 1932–1933, and far lower than the 1959–1961 famine in China during the so-called Great Leap Forward) than because the study of the Great Bengal Famine fundamentally transformed the way we now think about famines, and about how to relieve or prevent them.

 

As Ó Gráda generously insists, this was due almost single-handedly to the work of Amartya Sen, who, as he puts it, "refocused" famine studies, reorienting it "from a Malthusian toward a distributionist perspective." Sen emphasized that a famine caused by a failure, or even just a serious shortfall, in the harvest would rapidly engender a devaluation of all non-food possessions--what famine specialists call "entitlements," so that the poorest people basically lose the purchasing power they need to ensure their own survival. Looking at the data without Malthusian prejudice, Sen demonstrated that it was simply not the case that food shortfalls were necessarily greater in periods of famine than they were in times when there was no threat of famine--and that, conversely, there were many periods, not only in Bengal but globally, in which the availability of food had actually declined and no famine had ensued.

 

To state it simply, if a bit reductively: Sen's work put an end, once and for all, to the false belief, derived from Malthus, that famines are primarily the result of food shortages and overpopulation. This may seem counter-intuitive, since overpopulation can be a factor and food shortfalls are a common proximate cause of famines. But whatever modifications Sen has made to his analysis in the three decades since he published his magisterial work Poverty and Famines, his fundamental idea that the principle cause of famine is not food availability within a given area but access to food--that is, whether people have the means of getting enough to eat, is now beyond question. Sen's other fundamental notion, developed in these pages, that democracy, or civil and political rights and press freedom, offer practical protection from famine, is somewhat more intuitive, and, in contrast to his theory of entitlements--a person's "ability to command enough food," as Sen put it--seems in need of complication. This is not because it is wrong, but because, as de Waal has pointed out, other preconditions such as administrative capacity have to exist for even democratic governments in poor countries to combat famine. As the example of China from the late 1960s demonstrates, it is also true that non-democratic governments may succeed in stamping out famine.

 

It is now absolutely clear that while many factors contributed to the Great Bengal Famine, an overall absence of food grains was not one of them. For Sen, the famine was principally the result of bureaucratic bungling by the British authorities and the consequent market failure. Ó Gráda demurs slightly, arguing that it was "largely due to the failure of the British authorities, for war-strategic reasons, to make good a genuine food deficit." Mars, he says, played a greater role than Malthus. Ó Gráda is unsparing, and his understatement is far more damning than the reckless speculations of Mike Davis, who is piously convinced that the British intentionally caused the deaths by starvation of millions of Bengalis. ("Wartime priorities," Ó Gráda writes, "deprived the Bengali poor of the food they so badly needed, disrupted food markets [to some extent], inhibited free speech, and delayed the public proclamation of famine conditions. The conclusion seems inescapable: the two million and more who perished in Bengal were mainly unwilling, colonial casualties of a struggle not of their own making--that against fascism.")

 

But if, in reality, the Great Bengal Famine was the last major unintended famine in Asia, all too many twentieth-century famines have been, as Ó Gráda writes, "deliberately engineered to kill." Had Davis really been looking for 'holocausts', he need have looked no further than the famine created by Lenin's government in 1920, by Stalin's in 1932, and by Mao's in 1959. Those catastrophes--ideologically inconvenient to the radical anti-imperialist left--really do fit his template of deliberately engineered acts of mass murder. It is these events, and their successors (above all in two other soi-disant Marxist regimes, Ethiopia in 1984–1985 and North Korea in 1995–1996), to which Ó Gráda turns in the last narrative chapter of his book.

 

Ó Gráda does not mince his words, and they are worth quoting at length. "It is a great irony," he writes,

 

that the most deadly famines of the last century--including the worst ever in terms of sheer numbers--occurred under regimes committed, at least on paper, to the eradication of poverty. The history of the USSR (1917–1989) is pockmarked by famine. Post-1949 China's remarkable record of achievements in terms of life expectancy and material progress will always be marred by the Great Leap Forward famine of 1959-61, resulting in the deaths of millions of people. Today, the people of the Democratic Republic of North Korea struggle to survive in the wake of a smaller famine.

 

While the degree to which the famine of 1920–1922 was actually orchestrated by Lenin's government may be impossible to establish, what Ó Gráda calls military "requisitions" for the revolutionary war effort--a policy that does not seem to have been very different from what the British did in Bengal in 1943--clearly played an important role. About the Soviet famine in 1932, sometimes called (though not by Ó Gráda) Stalin's "terror famine" and chronicled by Robert Conquest in his great prosecutor's brief Harvest of Sorrow, there is less doubt. While Ó Gráda is adamant that Conquest's argument that the famine was deliberately engineered and politically motivated, particularly against Ukrainians, and compounded by the famine deaths occasioned by what Ó Gráda calls "forced migration to the Gulag," needs to be revised, he certainly does not repudiate what he refers to as "the traditional verdict." The most that he is willing to say is that one must also see the famine as "the outcome of a political struggle between a ruthless regime, bent on industrialization at breakneck speed, and an exploited and uncooperative peasantry."

 

About the famine of 1959 in China, which is often referred to as the worst man-made famine in history, Ó Gráda is equally judicious. The truth about the famine, he writes (adding, typically, "insofar as it can be inferred from the fallible sources available"), is that it "was due to a combination of natural and man-made causes"--"three parts nature and seven parts man," in the words that he quotes from Liu Sha-ch'i, the nominal head of the Chinese state between 1959 and his death under torture at the beginning of the Cultural Revolution in 1969. The point is an important one. It is too common for discussions of the causes of famine that take place in the aftermath of Sen's pathbreaking work to give the impression that natural factors have no role whatsoever in famines, and that only political malevolence, economic inequality, or bureaucratic bungling are to blame. This is certainly not what Sen meant to imply. It is certainly not Ó Gráda's view. But whatever the role of natural causes, the role of the state in these great famines has been incontrovertibly terrible.

 

Ó Gráda is equally cautious in offering a view as to whether the famines in Ethiopia in the mid-1980s and North Korea in the mid-1990s fit "the same category" as those in the Soviet Union or the China of the Great Leap Forward. His caution does him credit, but while he is right to insist that we know too little about what took place in North Korea (he cites a CIA report, for example, that casts doubt on the commonplace journalistic assertion that famine killed up to three million people in the DPRK in the 1990s), he is perhaps overly cautious with regard to the Ethiopian famine. He is right to say that the war waged by the Ethiopian government against secessionist movements in the northern provinces of Wollo and Tigre was "a more important contributory factor [to the famine] than its ill-advised economic policies." But for once Ó Gráda's scholarly caution seems excessive.

 

In the words of the late François Jean, a leading figure in Doctors Without Borders and a man who knew the Ethiopian situation intimately, famine came to be used by the government in Addis Ababa as "a trump card to weaken opposition movements and control populations." Like Soviet Russia in the immediate aftermath of the Bolshevik revolution and like China in the Great Leap Forward, Ethiopia was a country where, as Jean put it, "a revolutionary rhetoric [coincided] with the actual execution of a radical project of social restructuring." And as in Russia and China before, what occurred was "the logical product of a system that seeks to lead an entire society on a forced march towards an absolute, compulsory Good."

 

Still, Ó Gráda is absolutely correct in saying that, globally speaking, "the scope ... to produce cataclysmic famine even in peacetime" is much reduced compared with what it has been in the past. In this, he explicitly endorses de Waal's argument that famine is now conquerable, and Sen's view that if the political will exists, then famines are not hard to prevent. De Waal actually puts the claim even more strongly in Famine Crimes, arguing that "for more than a century there has been no excuse for famine." And while he is unwilling (or perhaps temperamentally averse) to write so categorically, Ó Gráda's analysis does seem to concur. As he notes, even in the case of Niger in 2005, probably the most serious case of famine in this decade, "a combination of public action, market forces, and food aid [has tended] to mitigate mortality." Put another way, even where famines do occur--above all in the countries of sub-Saharan Africa, which Ó Gráda dubs "the last redoubts of famine"--they are less deadly.

 

This African exception is not difficult to explain. "Only in sub-Saharan Africa," Ó Gráda remarks, "has the food output failed to keep pace with the population." And while Ó Gráda is at pains to underline the point that the link between the aggregate food supply and famine is "looser nowadays than it was in Malthus' time," the combination of the steady desertification of the Sahel since 1970 and the essential fact that only in parts of sub-Saharan Africa has the so-called demographic transition to lower fertility rates even begun to take place (unlike in China, India, Mexico, Vietnam, Bangladesh, and elsewhere) means, in Ó Gráda's words, that African agriculture "has been running in order to stand still."

 

This does not mean that the situation is hopeless, even in the world's most illfavored countries, such as Niger. The U.N.'s World Food Programme, whose food aid now is the difference between life and death for starving people in the global hunger zones, is increasingly studying strategies for pre-empting famines and periods of acute malnutrition, rather than responding to them once they have already begun. Even longtime critics of the WFP, both among nongovernmental relief agencies and relief specialists, believe that under its current director, Josette Sheeran, the agency is performing more effectively than ever, and in conditions that have rarely been more difficult. Another reason for cautious optimism about the fate of contemporary famine may be culled from Sen's argument that civil and political rights are in themselves prophylactics against famine, and that the more democratic a society becomes, the less famine-prone it is likely to be. In my view, Ó Gráda somewhat overstates the advance of democracy in Africa, but there can be no question that substantial progress has been made over the last twenty years.

 

The final chapter of Ó Gráda's book is called "An End to Famine?" It is a question, not an assertion. He is right to put it that way. What is far less certain is whether his claim that "as much as anything else, the slow, onward march of accountable government will rid the world's last vulnerable regions of the scourge of famine," and, more broadly, that "the prospect of a famine-free world hinges on improved governance and peace," is not overly sanguine. Ó Gráda knows that while famine may now be preventable, there is no good reason to believe the same of war--and war between and within nations is for him what may usher in a new age of famine.

 

But war is not the only threat. Climate change, which by most projections will disproportionately damage rural Africa, but may well also cause great damage in parts of Asia from which famine has now been banished, surely poses a graver threat of famine than war does. Some wars can be prevented or halted, but it is unlikely, given the pressing nature of the climate emergency and the apparent unwillingness or incapacity of the principal polluters--the United States, the EU, Japan, China, India--to do anything serious to mitigate it, that the same can be said about global warming. Ó Gráda touches on climate change, but gives it less emphasis than its importance warrants--a signal failing in an otherwise magnificent book.

 

No one looking for sensible rather than sentimental or ideological reasons to believe in the possibility of human progress need look any further than the fact that, for the first time in human history, it is possible to imagine the end of famine. When Ó Gráda writes that "at present, only the poorest regions of Africa remain at risk, and prolonged famine anywhere is conceivable only in contexts of endemic warfare or blockade," he is saying something that could never have been said before. To be sure, there are also many other things to say, other questions to ask--most notably why, if we are now so competent at dealing with famine, we are so incompetent at dealing with chronic malnutrition, which is getting no better, and in some cases is actually getting worse, even in democratic countries such as India that seem to have banished famine. The other three horsemen of the apocalypse will likely always be with us. But the possibility that we have seen the fourth horseman off for good is a reason for the most profound thankfulness.

 



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