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Dhaka Diary
The ministries of industry and energy are hardly bothered about the adverse impact of the frequent power blackouts on the economy,
writes Sayed Kamaluddin
Heat wave, power outage and boro crop
The Met Office has said the other day that the current mild heat wave in the country is likely to prolong for a while, maybe up to 10 days or even more, but that will be a boon for the millions of farmers; it will be good for the boro harvest. The temperature in the coming days is likely to remain around 38 degrees Celsius, which would obviously be tough for the people but good for the paddy. The assistant director of the Met Office, Sujit Dev Sharma, was quoted by the Financial Express last Sunday as explaining that the bright light and hot conditions are likely to continue until the end of this month. During this time, the scorching sun and long summer daytime will help increase photosynthesis in the paddy field which will ensure better yield.
This season, a record 4.7 million hectares of land have been brought under boro cultivation. Of this, 3.2 million hectares were earmarked for high-yield variety, 1.25 million hectares under hybrid rice and only 125,000 hectares have been brought under the local variety of boro. According to government statistics, actual boro production during 2007 was recorded at 1.5 million tonnes and this year’s production target has been set at 1.75 million tonnes – a whopping 17 per cent rise.
Is it realistic to set such a high target? While two government experts, agriculture adviser Dr CS Karim and food adviser Dr AMM Shawkat Ali, maintained that the target was achievable, they said for this to happen the timely availability of all inputs to the farmers was extremely important. Karim had also added that weather condition is as important for the purpose. Karim, being a scientist, linked his ministry’s forecast to good weather with smooth and timely supply of agricultural inputs for a good crop for the achievability of any estimated production target of food grains in a disaster-prone country like Bangladesh is always dependent on the vagaries of the nature.
Some experts at a seminar arranged by the Centre for Policy Dialogue in early February, however, did not agree that it was possible to achieve a 17 per cent production growth in one year. In another seminar organised by the CPD on April 21, entitled ‘Boro Procurement and Food Security Strategy: An Actionable Agenda’, it was suggested ‘the country is going to harvest 16.4 million tonnes of (boro) rice this year’. This estimate was based on the CPD’s own study. At the same seminar, the agriculture ministry’s Department of Agriculture Extension said on the basis of its estimate that the harvest ‘might reach 17.6 million tonnes’. The difference between the two estimates is a hefty 1.2 million tonnes. However, the 1.2 million tonnes of rice can make or mar all the calculations that are now being made. Is there any scientific basis for arriving at a reasonably correct forecast on such calculations? One wonders.
New target and the reality
The CPD study has also suggested that a production target of at least 32 million tonnes of rice needs to be set for the next fiscal (FY2008-09) and all efforts of the stakeholders must be geared to attain this ‘comfort zone of food security’, While presenting the study, the CPD’s research chief Uttam Dev said: ‘Considering the hurdles of rice import in the current fiscal as well as export ban by major rice exporting countries, Bangladesh must depend on its own production to meet its food grain requirements.’ This, too, is an ambitious target and Dev genuinely felt that to achieve this ‘all efforts of the stakeholders must be geared up to attain this’. Anyone can hardly disagree with the proposition.
Karim agrees with Dev’s assertion and says incredibly: ‘We can expand our cultivable land, ensure smooth supply of quality seeds, fertilisers, electricity and diesel (for electricity) for farmers…(and) a target for production of 32 million tons of rice next fiscal is achievable.’ Dev is an economist (and as they say, even-handed economists don’t exist) and chances are that he may have been carried away by his calculations as well as emotion and accordingly reached the conclusion. Besides, to err is human. But how Karim, who is a scientist and by now after 16-month of his crash on-the-job training and the experience gained in the agriculture ministry must have made him a more realist, could so readily agree with Dev’s formula? After all, Dev has no responsibility in implementing his theory but by agreeing with him unconditionally, Karim has accepted the challenge of proving Dev and himself right.
Karim has not apparently lost all his senses. On being pressed further to sort out the existing problems at the roundtable, he sensibly argued: ‘Please don’t ask us to solve all the problems. We may take up some plans for next one or two years, but the next government will have to take the responsibility of making the long-term development plan.’ However, what intrigues one in the first place is that having the experience of overseeing the multifarious problem of ‘smooth supply of quality seeds’ (if available and timely too), ‘supply of fertiliser, electricity, diesel to farmers’, how could he possibly agree that the 32-million-tonne production target of rice during the next fiscal is possible under the present circumstances?
Yes, it is certainly possible theoretically to produce even more than 32 million tonnes of food grain if more land is brought under cultivation and all the agricultural inputs, mentioned in the foregoing, are made available to the farmers on time. On the top of it, the weather condition has to be congenial as well. But does it appear logical? In view of this, it may not be quite out of place to suggest that the agriculture adviser perhaps buoyed by the gung-ho mood of the seminar participants, came out with a speech that sounded more like a politician’s address to the gallery, devoid of any logic and reason.
Be that as it may, this time around the government has announced its rice procurement policy quite early and set the target at 1.5 million tonnes, which many pooh-poohed for what they thought may be outlandish. However, food adviser Dr Shawkat Ali, who had considerable experience in the agriculture ministry as secretary, gave reasons for an early policy and the size of the procurement target. He said: ‘Considering all factors, the government has announced its early procurement plan. This year we will buy rice and paddy directly from the farmers too… As the government in 2006 was able to procure one million tons or rice, we will be able to fulfil our target this year also.’
Industry: other victim of heat wave
The other victim of the heat wave that has adversely affected the lives of the people across the board happens to be the industrial sector because of frequent power outages. Different types of manufacturing industries are suffering throughout the country and those with firm date for fulfilling their export orders are in deep sheet. A large section of both the manufacturing industry and businesses (traders selling merchandise in shops and bazaars) are increasingly becoming dependent on generators to meet the power shortages. And it is costing them quite a packet – ten to fifteen per cent additional cost, depending on the nature of their job.
Many of the larger manufacturing units have made their own power supply arrangements by installing captive power projects. However, the small and medium-sized enterprises are claiming to be the most serious victims of this erratic power supply. According to the industry sources, 40 per cent of the manufacturing industries, which fall under the SME category, are suffering from huge production losses. As a result, cost of doing business – both manufacturing and commercial sectors – has increased alarmingly. What is worse, there is no possibility of any improvement in the situation in the next six to eight months’ time.
The ministries of industry and energy are hardly bothered about the adverse impact of the frequent power blackouts on the economy. Some of members of the council of advisers have developed a habit of periodically appealing to the industrialists and other large power users to be economical in their usage of power without trying to understand the adverse impact of their sermon on the manufacturing industries and the national economy as a whole. They do not try to understand the overall impact and importance of the small and medium enterprises on the national economy and do not take their convenience into consideration. Apparently, many of them tend to become aware of the importance of the SMEs only when addressing a seminar or function, earmarked specifically for the SME sector, where they deliver speeches written by others.
According to Bangladesh Bank deputy governor Ziaul Hasan Siddiqui, there is no alternative to the SME sector for employment generation because it is the most labour-intensive industry. In Bangladesh, SMEs constitute about 80 per cent of the total business and the sector’s contribution to GDP stands at 25 per cent. These facts were revealed recently at a workshop on the development of the SMEs in the country. The crises are overwhelming and the troubleshooting ability of the government is limited and therefore, the government leaders appear to be trying to lie low and waiting for the troubles to somehow blow over their head and relieve them.
The ecological bubbles
Growth in economies, human populations and resources accessed by destroying ecosystems is a disease upon the living Earth. The malignant growth machine turns ecosystems into resources and then into financial investment papers and consumption. A year later the consumer products are in the landfill, the paper wealth may be further overpriced or just scrap paper, and there are both fewer resources and ecosystems – but always more people,
writes Tarequl Islam Munna
ECOLOGICAL overshoot whereby humanity exceeds the Earth’s carrying capacity is the mother of all ‘bubbles’. Within the current subprime mortgage and financial bubbles, and food and energy price increases, we are witnessing the logical and inevitable economic consequences of over-population, resource scarcity, inequitable and unreasonable consumption, and unsustainable economic growth. Growth and livelihoods based upon unreasonable presumptions of continued resource outputs from dwindling ecosystems are a dangerous, unprecedented ‘ecological bubble’ that threatens civilisation and mass apocalyptic death.
The global growth machine is seizing up because it is hitting ecological limits, and as a result of its own greed. Clearly the addition of a billion more people every decade and a half, physical limits upon arable land and fossil fuels – as well as exceeding the atmosphere’s waste absorption capacity and minimum amount of intact terrestrial ecosystems necessary to power the biosphere – are together severely negatively impacting economies and individual’s well-being. The economic slowdown is painful for many families. We are all finding it harder to pay the mortgage, buy food and fuel, and enjoy some special luxuries. Yet all bubbles burst – be they historically for tulips in Holland or property in Japan.
Yet this economic cooling may also offer a welcome respite to reconsider the growth-at-any-cost madness devouring the Earth’s life-giving ecosystems, and which threatens to impoverish and kill many or all of us. It is essential that we look at the far deeper ecological roots to this economic crisis, and their foretelling of related environmental bubbles. The ongoing biofuel scam, using first food and soon trees as fuel to supposedly avert climate change, shows the potential for ill-conceived climate change responses to increase land pressures, food prices and negatively impact economies. These sorts of macro ecological/economic connections are examined further here.
Humans seem to always want more, even when there is none, or achieving it diminishes the future. A colleague recently pointed out to me that there may be a genetic component, expressed subconsciously, to humanity’s expansionist bent that constantly seeks more, bigger and better human works. And that there are societal memes that foster and promote this myth that endless growth and expansion in population, consumption and resource use at the expense of ecological habitats is possible. For a few hundred years the western economic model of markets and growth that builds upon these human proclivities has created wealth while wreaking havoc upon peoples, societies and ecosystems.
Growth in economies, human populations and resources accessed by destroying ecosystems is a disease upon the living Earth. The malignant growth machine turns ecosystems into resources and then into financial investment papers and consumption. A year later the consumer products are in the landfill, the paper wealth may be further overpriced or just scrap paper, and there are both fewer resources and ecosystems – but always more people. The ability to live well based upon long-term steady-state interdependence with intact, healthy ecosystems and their natural capital is lost forever.
The mortgage bubble is a case is point. In America and many other over-developed countries the size of new homes grew and amenities seemed to know few limits. Each had to have restaurant quality kitchens, hardwood floors, multi-car garages, track lighting, and other seemingly endless conspicuous consumption to denote social class. Each represents the unsustainable consumption of resources from ecosystems, and requires continued intensive inputs to maintain. Most such development requires extensive automobile travel, sprawl into native ecosystems, and energy that will not be there in the future.
These extravagant McMansions are the epitome of everything wrong with ‘modern’ society, industrial capitalism, and demonstrates our detachment from the Earth, whose habitats are our true home. This more-at-any-expense economy that knows no limits and has no concept of enough is responsible for our current economic downturn and is literally killing our future economic and ecological prospects. Can those that believe in markets and capitalism not entertain any limits upon the size and resource use intensity of our homes? Does anyone see the connection between more people using more resources to build large homes, leading to less farmland and overuse of limited energy, resulting in food and energy price hikes?
In the mortgage bubble, we are seeing the first signs of many wholly ecological bubbles to come. The world is not only at peak oil, but well past peak water, land, climate, oceans, food and energy in general. Rising food prices are the front edge of the food bubble – a result of over-population, climate change, water shortages and land scarcity. The climate bubble has already begun to burst – it is too late to return to the relatively stable set of climate patterns with which we evolved – but failure to stabilise emissions as early as possible will bring far worse. And perhaps most ominously, and by extension of the food and climate bubbles, we are facing a deadly water bubble that is already disrupting societies and may prove insurmountable.
These ecological bubbles are partly responsible for the current economic downturn, and unless addressed now, they are certainly going to soon fully burst with calamitous impacts in their own right upon societal and individual well-being. The American dream which has been embraced by the world – based upon a subconscious urge to expand our dominance over nature and always, forever have more of everything, with constant societal pressure to do so – will have to give way to a more organic, ecologically-cognisant reality of living simply but well within ecological limits. Sadly for many, but a blessing for the Earth system and the not super rich, the whole world cannot live an over-consumptive super-sized lifestyle without destroying being.
It is time for a new global dream. The new dream would include aspiring that all have their basic needs met, even as individuals are free to pursue their passions and fortunes, as long as they do not undermine common ecological systems. Such a dream seeks to avert apocalyptic ecological and societal collapse through promotion of a sense of personal enoughness, voluntary simplicity and a whole range of necessary fundamental changes in society such as ending the use of coal and logging of ancient forests.
One thing is clear – more unbridled growth based upon unsustainable resource use will not solve the global ecological problems associated with unbridled growth and unsustainable resource use. The human enterprise and each global citizen’s consumption aspirations must be downsized to a scale appropriate to ecosystem limits. Or the Earth herself – as it turns out, with the assistance of the human created economic system – will do so brutally.
The industrial resource and illusory financial binge must end if we are to reverse the destruction, and begin the restoration, of the biosphere, its component ecosystems, and their ability to provide natural capital upon which to base a steady-state economy. It is time to get back to making honest, good livings from actually making or doing something of societal value, by making a living with the land and the Earth, and that does not depend upon liquidating ecological being and financial speculation.
Tarequl Islam Munna is a journalist, and wildlife and environment conservator
Victory of a radical priest in Paraguay
Religion which once played the revolutionary role in crushing the Byzantine, Roman and Persian Empire, is again back in the scene in a different context. Obviously, this religion is not the religion of the popes and sultans; this is the religion of unflinching faith of the poor and hungry. This is the religion of the poor and hungry – a broad coalition of people above race and culture, writes by Nehal Adil
THE sixty-year-old control of the conservative Colorado Party, representative of financial oligarchy, and their patron US has been shattered by the victory of a radical priest in Paraguay. It can be compared to the electoral victory of the Maoists in Nepal. Both Paraguay and Nepal are landlocked countries and considered most conservative in their respective continents. Both are surrounded by big countries of significant geopolitical weight. Paraguay is surrounded by Brazil and Argentina and Nepal by India and China. But the power that mattered was that of the distant United States.
That arithmetic has changed.
Many consider religion as a dead force. But to the poor and hungry they can emerge with tremendous strength. The guerrillas of Nepal took up arms to fight royal autocracy. Their victory in the poll ratified their armed struggle. It is not negation of armed struggle but popular mandate for it. The so-called mainstream left defied it but it was they who were the casualties. The traditional left defied religion as a reactionary force – but it is the radical Catholicism that has turned into the most powerful voice against the inhuman exploitation by imperialism in Latin America as it is done by radical Islam in Asia and Africa. The Maoists in Nepal had not disowned religion but gave it a revolutionary dimension in the struggle of oppressed humanity.
Once I saw an amateur Bhutanese film in Paris that Lord Buddha was returning as Mao crossing the Himalayas. Late Ahmed Sofa saw Atish Dipankar as a revolutionary, father of a new order in our land.
Fidel Castro said Christ was the greatest revolutionary born. His follower Hugo Chavez repeated it at the last OPEC summit in Saudi Arabia, but it created some controversy since Muslims consider Prophet Muhammad should have that honour. Is there any contradiction in that? Prophet Mohammad accepted Jesus as his predecessor and as Yasser Arafat once observed nobody can be a true Muslim, if he does not believe in Jesus or Moses also.
Atheist communism overthrew the false god of the oppressors and now is being replaced by the true god of the oppressed. That is dialectics. The fall of the Soviet Union followed by the greatest capitalist disorder is turning the whole world into a revolutionary socialist Soviet Union, not a stagnant neo-capitalist Soviet Union of Brezhnev. The lack of vision hindered those who danced around the Berlin Wall to see that. They took its harvest in the collapse of twin towers and bloodied battle fields of Iraq and Afghanistan.
War and violence are by-products of imperialist aggression and tyranny.
Forces of peace and social change prefer harmony and social cohesion. It can happen if the forces of oppression can be successfully de-mobilised. It happened in Nepal and Paraguay, because imperialism as a global force, engulfed in the wars of Iraq and Afghanistan, has turned toothless. Paraguay’s neighbours Brazil and Argentina have radical regimes that welcome the change in Paraguay as do China and India in case of Nepal. It is this regional diplomacy and regional assertion that has made the headway.
It is not of a less significance that a radical priest born in the United States but presently a citizen of Nicaragua and one of the architect of that country’s revolution in the seventies and a courageous fighter against Reagan-Bush Contra offensive and subversion in that unfortunate country has been elected the president of the United Nations General Assembly, against all opposition from the United States.
In fact, religion, which once played the revolutionary role in crushing the Byzantine, Roman and Persian Empire, is again back in the scene in a different context. Obviously, this religion is not the religion of the popes and sultans; this is the religion of unflinching faith of the poor and hungry. This is the religion of the poor and hungry – a broad coalition of people above race and culture.
The revolutionary priests of the Jesuit movement played the most historic role in shaping the present-day Paraguay. When Marx and Lenin were not born these Jesuit priests came from Europe and stood by the oppressed indigenous population to create a new order of social equality. Many of these revolutionary Jesuits were Germans. They were suppressed by the then colonial powers.
Their citadel in Paraguay was attacked by all the forces of established powers – Britain and the US among them – through the triple alliance of Brazil, Uruguay and Argentina. It was a war of genocide against a peaceful nation of mixed race and of love and fraternity. President Lopez fought in the battlefield; nearly two-thirds of his people were killed. Paraguay lost half of its land and the country was in ruin.
But his spirit was not gone. With his red flag came the Colorado Party. As it ruled, it deviated from its policy and turned a reactionary tool of the national and international vested interests as was the Communist Party of Soviet Union under Brezhnev and Gorbachev.
It was the left – the broad coalition of workers, peasants, soldiers and revolutionary clergy united under one banner challenged the Colorado supremacy in the ballot.
It has definitely frustrated the US Southern Command’s dream to turn Paraguay as a base of subversion against neighbouring countries. In the past the US Southern Command had held several military exercises in Paraguay and had its agents among Paraguayan generals. But members of the Paraguayan armed forces remained loyal to the country and its democracy. The US Southern Command and its agents failed to influence the election against the victorious democratic forces because people of the world including those of the United States stand by the people of Paraguay.
Food price
Food price is increasing alarmingly all over the globe. Food crisis has rightly been described as mass murder by the UN. The question that naturally arises now is what steps would be taken by the UN to tackle the crisis. It has been observed that the UN has failed to play a positive role in the greater interest of the poor countries of the world.
Abul Kalam Azad
Barisal, via SMS
Silent famine
A silent famine is likely to occur in the country as the prices of the essential commodities are skyrocketing. The prices have already gone beyond the reach of the common people.
Rayhan
Jahangir Nagar University, via SMS
Darkness under the light
Like many other institutions, Viqarunnisa Noon School and College has become a den of corruption. This institution claims itself to be the best among the educational institutions of the country. The students seem to be elite and alienated from the society. The news of rampant corruption about this institution is not a new one — but a chronic one. What the young learners can expect to get from this institution? Mere certificates?
Let the corrupt elements be driven out of our education sector.
Moznu
Sunamganj, via SMS
Moriarty’s advice
The newly-appointed US ambassador, James F Moriarty, wasted no time in advising Bangladesh government on what to do and not to do after his arrival in Dhaka and presentation of his credential to the president.
Well, the poor and aid-receiving Bangladesh may need his advice but whether this sort of advice is compatible with diplomatic norms or decorum is a question that Moriarty needs to think about carefully. His 3D theory may be well-intentioned, but he could have kept it to himself rather than making it public in such manner. Does his country allow this kind of freedom to any foreign diplomat to get involved in US internal matters and lecture the US government?
Tayeb Husain
On e-mail
World Bank tackles food emergency
Bangladesh shouldn’t depend on World Bank and similar brokers. They bring more bad things than good. We should grow more food on our own rather than surrendering to the Western institutions’ blackmailing tactics.
Dr Karim
Australi
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Next on Quick Comments
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a. EC finally invites BNP splinter group for talk (New Age, April 23)
b. Khaleda asks counsels to take steps against EC decision (New Age, April 23)
c. SC overturns HC’s EPR bail verdict: The Supreme Court (SC) today overturned a High Court (HC) ruling over its jurisdiction to dispose of petitions by persons seeking bail in criminal cases under the Emergency Power Rules (EPR) 2007 (http://www.thedailystar.net/latest/updates.php?pid=8)
c. DAE plays down extent of boro disease outbreak (New Age, April 23)
d. Diarrhoea patients fill hospitals as summer gets hotter (New Age, April 23)
e. Hillary Clinton wins key Democratic vote
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