A letter published in the latest (02/02/08) issue of the British medical journal The Lancet, makes for interesting reading. According to researchers at the Imperial College in the United Kingdom, rising sea levels and deeper inland encroachment of seawater, mostly induced by man-made climate change, are now emerging as a major public health threat alongside its severe and well-documented impacts on food-grain production.
   According to preliminary findings, the researchers have found that ‘increased salinity of drinking water is likely to have a range of health effects, including increased hypertension rates. Large numbers of pregnant women in the coastal areas are being diagnosed with pre-eclampsia, eclampsia, and hyper tension.’ While the link between the impacts climate change will have on water – be they shortages, rising salinity or increased rainfall – have pointed to a potentially higher incidence of waterborne diseases such as cholera, diarrhoea and dysentery, the evidence on reported cases of ‘involuntary foetus abortion due to rising salinity in coastal areas’ has at best been anecdotal.
   Imperial College researcher Aneire Khan and her colleagues write in The Lancet: ‘We reviewed hospital records of antenatal check-ups between January and September, 2007, from the Department of Gynaecology in Chalna Upazilla Health Complex — a clinic based in one of the ports in the southwestern region of Bangladesh. Of 561 women undergoing antenatal check-ups, 118 (21%) between the ages of 16 and 40 years were diagnosed with some kind of hypertensive disorder. This rate is strikingly higher than the 2.65% seen in Matuail… a non-coastal area, and the prevalences of pregnancy-induced systolic and diastolic hypertension of 6.8% and 5.4%, respectively, in another non-coastal rural community of Bangladesh.’
   ‘With both perinatal and maternal mortality remaining persistently high in Bangladesh, an urgent assessment of this situation is warranted,’ Aneire and her colleagues have written.
   The understanding of how human-induced climate change affects the spectrum of public health issues that confront Bangladesh as well as scores of other least developed nations is only now beginning to be unravelled through a series of fractured data sets, and not nearly at the pace at which it will have a meaningful impact on our ability to deal with changing weather cycles. One of the principal pathways through which climate change is likely to affect human health in the least-developed countries in general is through its impact on food-grain production and consumption.
   Bangladesh already loses over 50,000 hectares of land to river erosion every year during the monsoon months. This coupled with the higher intensity and frequency of floods and tropical cyclones are expected to have a disastrous impact on total food-grain production. Given that over 50 per cent of the total labour force is dependent on agricultural employment as a source of livelihood, the combined effects of these phenomena are likely to push hundreds of thousands of families beyond the margins of minimal sustenance. While the government might be able to offset food-grain output shortages with higher levels of imports, the per capita absorption of food-grain is likely to decline through what is known in as ‘entitlement failures’ which imply that even though food-grain may be available in the markets, sections of the population do not have the means to purchase them. Given that in rural Bangladesh, income in kind traditionally outstrips money income, and even well-off families are asset rich rather than money-rich and given that the bulk of the farming families are either sharecroppers or subsistence farmers, the impact of lower food-grain production has the potential to be disastrous.
   As the authors of the Bangladesh’s National Adaptation Plan of Action have pointed out, ‘deteriorating health and nutrition, higher morbidity and susceptibility to disease will result in lower levels of employment, losses in productivity and consequently in output and income further accentuating [the] adverse impacts [of climate change]’. The action plan identifies heat stress, increased pathogenic activity, water pollution, salinity of water and water shortages as the major impacts of climate change in the health sector in the country. It also points out that medical expenses will emerge as an added burden to rural communities, lowering their available budgetary resources for other necessary expenditures.
   In Bangladesh, coastal areas account for over 30 per cent of the net available cultivable land. One of the principal reasons that large swathes of coastal land remain un- or under-utilised is because of growing levels of salinity which limits the growth of standing crops. While rising sea levels and saltwater encroachment are the major causal factor behind the impoverishment of countless numbers of farming families, the new threat that has emerged in the past decade is that of shrimp farms along the coast. The rising popularity of shrimp farms may be seen as an adaptation technique that seeks to find a productive use for land rendered non-arable by high salinity, but it is also having a multiplier effect in rendering further tracts of land unsuitable for agriculture. Climate change researchers increasingly point to growing numbers of farming families forced to sell their agricultural land to shrimp farmers in the coastal belt because the prevalence of saline water in neighbouring shrimp farms are causing their land to lose productivity. Needless to say, it is not the marginal farmer who is the prime beneficiary of shrimp farming.
   A 1997 study by the Bangladesh Ministry of Environment and Forests draws out a series of land-salinity projections based on scenarios that assume moderate to severe climate change. According to that study, in the case of moderate climate change, by 2030, 10 per cent of the present non-saline land in the country will become slightly saline and a similar amount of slightly saline land will move to a higher salinity class. In the case of severe climate change however, by 2075, over 45 per cent of the present non-saline areas will become slightly saline, and a similar amount of saline land will move further upward in terms of salinity. It was projected at the time that about 196,000 tonnes of rice is lost annually due to salinity. That figure can be assumed to have grown considerably since. Under the circumstances, the National Adaptation Plan of Action reveals that productivity of land has grow at an annual rate of 2.8 per cent per annum, to offset the losses of crop due to rising salinity, a near impossible target that the maximum that the country has ever experienced is an annual productivity growth of 1.5 per cent.
   While it is only now that the importance that human-induced climate change is getting in the global platform is fuelling a flux of studies that look into the socio-economic phenomena it has set into motion, the data and analysis on these phenomena are still scant, making it near impossible to piece together a cohesive projection for the country’s climate change outlook. One the one hand, adaptations projects need to increase in size and scope to help marginal communities deal with climate change, but at the heart of adaptations strategies will have to be a comprehensive agenda that seeks to identify problems before money is thrown at developing PR-friendly solutions. In Bangladesh, which has become the veritable poster child for the worst excesses of global climate change, what we don’t know about the complex socio-economic factors that are rapidly changing with fluctuating rainfall or increased floods, affecting the lives and livelihood of the country’s 140 million people, easily dwarfs what little we do know about it.
   mahtabhaider@gmail.com

FORMER Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev’s rare rebuke of Russia’s President Vladimir Putin is a reminder that the land of the tsars and Communist ideology has reached a fork. That fork is not the simplistic one defined by the West as one between authoritarianism and democracy. Rather, it is a question of moulding the diminished modern state of the Russian Federation into a functioning democracy at peace with the Russian soul.
   President Putin’s task is complicated by a host of problems. In one sense, it was easy to reverse Boris Yeltsin’s disastrous stewardship of the state after the disintegration of the Soviet Union – the darling of the West had, indeed, delivered the coup de grace. He had to demolish the power of the oligarchs who had embedded themselves in the Kremlin power structure. And President Putin was lucky to receive the windfall of sky-high energy prices for his country’s hydrocarbon riches.
   Over some eight years, Putin had brought stability and a measure of prosperity to his sorely tried people. He had decided that to rein in separatist ambitions, he had to restore the institution of appointed provincial governors. And to a people dismayed at seeing their leader Yeltsin following not merely American economic prescriptions to disastrous effect but also serving US, rather than Russian, national interests on the world stage, he brought hope by insisting that Russia still counted.
   The approaching end of his mandatory second term in early 2008 was recognised as an important test for Putin and Russia because it would define the country’s future direction. Given his popularity and the people’s wishes, it would have been easy for him to amend the constitution, but he would have diminished his own and his country’s stature in the process. In the event, he chose to bless a candidate, Dmitry Medvedev, to succeed him while choosing to serve as his future prime minister.
   It was, at best, a messy compromise. Putin had headed the list of the king’s party, United Russia, to contest parliamentary elections it expectedly won handsomely. All the cards were stacked in the party’s favour. And in the run-up to the presidential elections early next month, the Kremlin has not covered itself with glory. A demonstration by former world chess champion Gary Kasparov was disrupted and he was briefly arrested. Besides, the only serious opposition candidate, former Prime Minister Mikhail Kasyanov – the other being the perennial Communist Party challenger Gennady Zyuganov – was disqualified on specious grounds.
   It was the rejection of Kasyanov’s candidature that provoked Gorbachev to take issue with Putin and call for electoral reforms. He had earlier criticised Putin for cutting welfare benefits to the elderly and less privileged, blaming his advisers more than him. Now he was more forthright in expressing his distress by declaring, ‘And now I sense an odour that says that soon in our government … there will appear slogans, such as less democracy, fewer social programmes.’
   Gorbachev wants major reform of the Russian electoral system, with individuals being allowed to contest parliamentary elections to reduce the power of the party bosses who determine the lists. In his view, parliament should enjoy greater powers, the judiciary should be independent and the executive’s powers should be curbed. He also counts the government’s decision to control the electronic media among Putin’s ‘mistakes.’ Unsurprisingly, Russian television channels did not carry Gorbachev’s criticism.
   How the projected ‘double-headed eagle,’ with Medvedev as president and Putin as prime minister, will work in practice remains to be seen. Some Russian analysts have openly expressed pessimism, fearing confusion and dissension in the executive branch, if not the downgrading of the presidency. The kindest construction one can place on the new formula is that Putin believed he had to be in the Kremlin power structure to influence policy at this stage of Russia’s development, rather than try to exercise influence as an elder statesman.
   Putin’s future task has become more difficult against the backdrop of continuing American attempts to contain Russia and stymie it by encircling it with a ring of pro-West NATO states. Washington used the disintegration of the Soviet Union to cripple the successor state as far into the future as possible by wooing Russia’s neighbours into a pro-West military alignment and trying to divert the energy resources of the former parts of the Soviet Union in Central Asia to the West outside Moscow’s reach. The icing on the cake, from US perspective, is the plan to install elements of a missile defence plan in Poland and the Czech Republic in Russia’s immediate neighbourhood.
   President Putin’s seminal warning to Washington on the dangers of its policy was made in Munich in February last year. If the West was taken aback by the vehemence and passion of President Putin’s sentiments, it had not paid heed to the Russian resentment building up over the years. Moscow particularly resented Washington’s determination to condemn Russia to a lowly status in the world after displacing it from the perch of a superpower. Having secured political stability and some prosperity, Putin was in a position to challenge the American dream of being the Second Roman Empire. Earlier, Russia had successfully bested the US at the latter’s own game of monopolising Central Asian energy resources.
   By all accounts, Putin is still groping towards seeking a democratic Russian solution to governing the vast and varied Russian Federation. A question Russians are asking is whether he is relying too much on the siloviki, men of the security services often with a KGB background, indirectly being blamed by Gorbachev under the rubric of bureaucrats.
   The double-headed eagle experiment is unlikely to succeed and the world is at a loss to understand why the Kremlin needs to resort to clumsy methods of suppressing dissent when Putin and his nominee would win hands down, given his popularity. Gorbachev has been supportive of Putin for most of the changes he has brought about. Asked by an interviewer whether he preferred stability or democracy for his country, he had answered, ‘…We need both things.’ Here lies the rub. Putin needs to figure out how he can implement Gorbachev’s wise formula.