The government’s assurance that there would not be any fertiliser shortage during the boro season does not add up with the reality on the ground,
writes Jayanta Kumar Basak

RICE is the staple food for the people of Bangladesh and will continue to remain so in future. Rice production systems make a vital contribution to the reduction of hunger and poverty in Bangladesh. Besides, its economy is heavily dependent on this sector. The country needs substantial increase in rice production to provide her teeming millions with food and other basic needs of life. There are not many options but to raise level of rice production from the limited land resources and diverse climatic conditions for improving the living standard of her common people. Variations in management practices (e.g. irrigation and fertiliser application), use of new high yielding varieties and modern technologies play a vital role to increase rice production of this country.
   Boro rice is one of the major cereal food grains in Bangladesh, which is transplanted in winter season (December to February). Productivity of boro rice depends on several climatic parameters (temperature, rainfall, humidity, etc), hydrological properties of soil (pH, organic carbon, cation exchange capacity, etc), rice varieties, and major production inputs, such as irrigation and fertiliser management practices, and above all government policies in this sector. A reasonable amount of boro rice production is hampered in every year as a consequence of the above factors interactive over different scale in different locations.
   Rice production was 34.28 million tonnes in 2008-09, where boro contributed more than 55 per cent (18.5 million tonnes). From the analysis of the last few years’ data we found that its contribution to total rice production follows an increasing trend. Recently, the rate is increasing rapidly due to adoption of high yielding rice varieties and modern rice cultivation technologies, and improvement in irrigation facilities and application of fertiliser and pesticides. But to continue with this production rate there should be proper management practices. HYV boro rice production depends on a considerable part on its proper management practices, mainly fertiliser and irrigation application in perfect growing stages. Therefore, ensuring irrigation and fertiliser at the farmer’s level in scheduled time (application time) are of major concern.
   The government has set a target 19 million tonnes for boro production in 2009-10. To achieve the target, all agricultural inputs which are involved directly or indirectly in boro production must be adequate and accessible to farmers during the production period (December to May). Targeted boro rice cultivation area is 4.8 million hectares in 2009-10 which is a quarter million hectares from 2008-09.
   Fertiliser is the most important nutrient element in soils and plays the most vital role in crop production in Bangladesh. Fertiliser application mainly depends on the soil types, growing season, irrigation applications and the cultivars used. The demand for fertiliser is also affected by agro-climatic conditions. High yielding varieties of boro are highly responsive and need adequate supply of fertiliser to achieve targeted production. Urea (nitrogen), triple supper phosphate, murate of potash, gypsum and zinc sulphate are the major fertilisers which are applied in agricultural land in various proportions for Boro rice production in Bangladesh. Urea is applied in two to three steps after boro rice transplanting and the other types of fertilisers are applied during the field preparation.
   The continuous and unbalanced use of chemical fertilisers under intensive cropping systems has been considered to be the main cause for declining crop yield and environmental degradation. From our study we found that for our targeted boro rice production, 13.83 lakh tonnes of urea, 5.65 lakh tonnes of TSP, 6.94 lakh tonnes of MOP, 41,000 tonnes of gypsum and 3.06 lakh tonnes of zinc sulphate would be required (applying fertiliser in nutrient recommended dose). Applying on the basis of soil fertility, fertiliser requirement would be 13.2, 4.20, 4.64, 0.38 and 2.85 lakh tonnes respectively and on the basis of farmer demand at the field level, it would be 12.60, 5.23, 6.43, 0.39 and 2.51 lakh tonnes respectively.
   The total urea fertiliser production in 2008-09 was 15 lakh tonnes in six urea factories and total demand was 28.50 lakh tonnes. Domestic production covered more than 50 per cent to the total demand of urea. Similarly, domestic production of TSP was 0.50 lakh tonnes, which covered 10 per cent, gypsum 0.60 lakh tonnes which was 40 per cent of the total demand. Moreover, MOP demand was 4 lakh tonnes which was completely imported. It is quite evident that fertiliser demands are heavily dependent on import. Therefore, any disruption in the supply chain is quite possible to affect the total production system.
   At a parliamentary meeting on December 31, 2009, the industries minister Dilip Barua stated that fertiliser stock is sufficient for the entire boro season and there are no possibilities of a spike in prices or shortage in supply. He added that 6.5 lakh tonnes of urea had already been buffer stocked and 3 lakh tonnes of urea will soon be added to the total stock, imported from Qatar (Prothom Alo, January 2). Therefore, there would be 9.5 lakh tonnes of urea in store for this season. But our boro rice production target is 19 million tonnes and corresponding urea fertiliser requirement is 13.83 lakh tonnes on the basis of nutrient recommended dose, 13.2 lakh tonnes on the basis of soil fertility and 12.60 lakh tonnes on the basis of farmer demand at the field level. As a result, there could be a shortage of more than 3 lakh tonnes with regard to total growing period. It should also be noted that other crops like wheat, potato, banana, etc are also grown in winter which are not considered in the fertiliser requirement analysis. A considerable amount of urea is applied for wheat, banana, potato and other vegetables in Bangladesh. If the requirement of urea for other crops in winter is added the percentages of shortage will be higher. From our analysis, it is clear that we will face a large gap between targeted production and fertiliser input. The supply of other fertilisers depends on the import policies of the government. Moreover, time and cost are also related with the whole process of import, production, market and above all the government’s distribution and monitoring policies.
   Sustainable increase in rice production for food sufficiency requires efforts to enhance the capacity of the rice production system. All agricultural inputs which are involved directly or indirectly in rice production must be adequate and accessible at the field level during the growing season. Timely supply and availability of fertilisers at reasonable prices at the doorsteps of farmers is necessary for our depleted soils for optimum supply of nutrients for successful boro rice production. Therefore, timely supply and availability of fertiliser should receive top priority to sustain/increase boro rice production when food availability is a crucial factor for the poverty-stricken people, when the country faces the challenge of feeding its increasing population.
   Jayanta Kumar Basak is a researcher at Unnayan Onneshan-The Innovators, an independent policy think-tank based in Dhaka. jayanta.kumar@unnayan.org

by Chris Hedges

Corporate forces, long before the Supreme Court’s decision in Citizens United v Federal Election Commission, carried out a coup d’état in slow motion. The coup is over. We lost. The ruling is one more judicial effort to streamline mechanisms for corporate control. It exposes the myth of a functioning democracy and the triumph of corporate power. But it does not significantly alter the political landscape. The corporate state is firmly cemented in place.
   The fiction of democracy remains useful, not only for corporations, but for our bankrupt liberal class. If the fiction is seriously challenged, liberals will be forced to consider actual resistance, which will be neither pleasant nor easy. As long as a democratic façade exists, liberals can engage in an empty moral posturing that requires little sacrifice or commitment. They can be the self-appointed scolds of the Democratic Party, acting as if they are part of the debate and feel vindicated by their cries of protest.
   Much of the outrage expressed about the court’s ruling is the outrage of those who prefer this choreographed charade. As long as the charade is played, they do not have to consider
   how to combat what the political philosopher Sheldon Wolin calls our system of ‘inverted totalitarianism’.
   Inverted totalitarianism represents ‘the political coming of age of corporate power and the political demobilisation of the citizenry,’ Wolin writes in ‘Democracy Incorporated’. Inverted totalitarianism differs from classical forms of totalitarianism, which revolve around a demagogue or charismatic leader, and finds its expression in the anonymity of the corporate state. The corporate forces behind inverted totalitarianism do not, as classical totalitarian movements do, boast of replacing decaying structures with a new, revolutionary structure. They purport to honour electoral politics, freedom and the constitution. But they so corrupt and manipulate the levers of power as to make democracy impossible.
   Inverted totalitarianism is not conceptualised as an ideology or objectified in public policy. It is furthered by ‘power-holders and citizens who often seem unaware of the deeper consequences of their actions or inactions,’ Wolin writes. But it is as dangerous as classical forms of totalitarianism. In a system of inverted totalitarianism, as this court ruling illustrates, it is not necessary to rewrite the Constitution, as fascist and communist regimes do. It is enough to exploit legitimate power by means of judicial and legislative interpretation. This exploitation ensures that huge corporate campaign contributions are protected speech under the First Amendment. It ensures that heavily financed and organised lobbying by large corporations is interpreted as an application of the people’s right to petition the government. The court again ratified the concept that corporations are persons, except in those cases where the ‘persons’ agree to a ‘settlement’. Those within corporations who commit crimes can avoid going to prison by paying large sums of money to the government while, according to this twisted judicial reasoning, not ‘admitting any wrongdoing’. There is a word for this. It is called corruption.
   Corporations have 35,000 lobbyists in Washington and thousands more in state capitals that dole out corporate money to shape and write legislation. They use their political action committees to solicit employees and shareholders for donations to fund pliable candidates. The financial sector, for example, spent more than $5 billion on political campaigns, influence peddling and lobbying during the past decade, which resulted in sweeping deregulation, the gouging of consumers, our global financial meltdown and the subsequent looting of the US Treasury. The Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America spent $26 million last year and drug companies such as Pfizer, Amgen and Eli Lilly kicked in tens of millions more to buy off the two parties. These corporations have made sure our so-called health reform bill will force us to buy their predatory and defective products. The oil and gas industry, the coal industry, defence contractors and telecommunications companies have thwarted the drive for sustainable energy and orchestrated the steady erosion of civil liberties. Politicians do corporate bidding and stage hollow acts of political theatre to keep the fiction of the democratic state alive.
   There is no national institution left that can accurately be described as democratic. Citizens, rather than participate in power, are allowed to have virtual opinions to preordained questions, a kind of participatory fascism as meaningless as voting on ‘American Idol’. Mass emotions are directed toward the raging culture wars. This allows us to take emotional stands on issues that are inconsequential to the power elite.
   Our transformation into an empire, as happened in ancient Athens and Rome, has seen the tyranny we practise abroad become the tyranny we practise at home. We, like all empires, have been eviscerated by our own expansionism. We utilise weapons of horrific destructive power, subsidise their development with billions in taxpayer dollars, and are the world’s largest arms dealer. And the constitution, as Wolin notes, is ‘conscripted to serve as power’s apprentice rather than its conscience.’
   ‘Inverted totalitarianism reverses things,’ Wolin writes. ‘It is politics all of the time but a politics largely untempered by the political. Party squabbles are occasionally on public display, and there is a frantic and continuous politics among factions of the party, interest groups, competing corporate powers, and rival media concerns. And there is, of course, the culminating moment of national elections when the attention of the nation is required to make a choice of personalities rather than a choice between alternatives. What is absent is the political, the commitment to finding where the common good lies amidst the welter of well-financed, highly organised, single-minded interests rabidly seeking governmental favours and overwhelming the practices of representative government and public administration by a sea of cash.’
   Hollywood, the news industry and television, all corporate controlled, have become instruments of inverted totalitarianism. They censor or ridicule those who critique or challenge corporate structures and assumptions. They saturate the airwaves with manufactured controversy, whether it is Tiger Woods or the dispute between Jay Leno and Conan O’Brien. They manipulate images to make us confuse how we are made to feel with knowledge, which is how Barack Obama became president. And the draconian internal control employed by the Department of Homeland Security, the military and the police over any form of popular dissent, coupled with the corporate media’s censorship, does for inverted totalitarianism what thugs and bonfires of books do in classical totalitarian regimes.
   ‘It seems a replay of historical experience that the bias displayed by today’s media should be aimed consistently at the shredded remains of liberalism,’ Wolin writes. ‘Recall that an element common to most 20th century totalitarianism, whether Fascist or Stalinist, was hostility towards the left. In the United States, the left is assumed to consist solely of liberals, occasionally of “the left wing of the Democratic Party,” never of democrats.’
   Liberals, socialists, trade unionists, independent journalists and intellectuals, many of whom were once important voices in our society, have been silenced or targeted for elimination within corporate-controlled academia, the media and government. Wolin, who taught at Berkeley and later at Princeton, is arguably the country’s foremost political philosopher. And yet his book was virtually ignored. This is also why Ralph Nader, Dennis Kucinich and Cynthia McKinney, along with intellectuals like Noam Chomsky, are not given a part in our national discourse.
   The uniformity of opinion is reinforced by the skilfully orchestrated mass emotions of nationalism and patriotism, which paints all dissidents as ‘soft’ or ‘unpatriotic’. The ‘patriotic’ citizen, plagued by fear of job losses and possible terrorist attacks, unfailingly supports widespread surveillance and the militarised state. This means no questioning of the $1 trillion in defence-related spending. It means that the military and intelligence agencies are held above government, as if somehow they are not part of government. The most powerful instruments of state power and control are effectively removed from public discussion. We, as imperial citizens, are taught to be contemptuous of government bureaucracy, yet we stand like sheep before Homeland Security agents in airports and are mute when Congress permits our private correspondence and conversations to be monitored and archived. We endure more state control than at any time in American history.
   The civic, patriotic and political language we use to describe ourselves remains unchanged. We pay fealty to the same national symbols and iconography. We find our collective identity in the same national myths. We continue to deify the Founding Fathers. But the America we celebrate is an illusion. It does not exist. Our government and judiciary have no real sovereignty. Our press provides diversion, not information. Our organs of security and power keep us as domesticated and as fearful as most Iraqis. Capitalism, as Karl Marx understood, when it emasculates government, becomes a revolutionary force. And this revolutionary force, best described as inverted totalitarianism, is plunging us into a state of neo-feudalism, perpetual war and severe repression. The Supreme Court decision is part of our transformation by the corporate state from citizens to prisoners.
   Truthdig, January 24. Chris Hedges is a Pulitzer Prize-winning correspondent

The inescapable truth is that ‘the world’ never forgave Haiti for its revolution, because the slaves freed themselves, writes Sidney Mintz

EVERY medium of communication in the world is now overrun with pronouncements about Haiti. Many have been ill-informed, and a few maliciously intemperate. The extreme comments have the effect of making those that are mildly reasonable in tone seem more reliable; some, more so than they deserve. The New York Times, for instance, editorialises about Haiti’s ‘generations of misrule, poverty and political strife’, as if those nouns were enough to explain the history of Haiti.
   Nations have beginnings, and then national histories, and the history of each is unique. I know how obvious that is. But the penchant among journalists and political scientists for creating phoney categories such as ‘kleptocracies’, ‘developing nations’, and ‘failed states’, and then using these categories to obstruct serious talk, in this case about Haiti, immobilises us and conceals the need to uncover the weight of local and particular history.
   The New World’s second republic has indeed known political strife, bad leadership and poverty. But to judge Haiti fairly, it is essential to remember that the country won its independence under the worst imaginable circumstances. The Haitians declared their freedom in 1804, when the New World was mostly made up of European colonies (and the United States) all busily extracting wealth from the labour of millions of slaves. This included Haiti’s neighbours, the island colonies of France, Great Britain, Denmark, and The Netherlands, among others. From the United States to Brazil, the reality of Haitian liberation shook the empire of the whip to the core. Needless to say, no liberal-minded aristocrats or other Europeans joined the rebel side in the Haitian Revolution, as some had in the American Revolution.
   The inescapable truth is that ‘the world’ never forgave Haiti for its revolution, because the slaves freed themselves.
   By using the sword against their oppressors, the Haitian people turned themselves into Thomas Jefferson’s universal human beings. Yet they were feared and reviled for having done so. International political, economic, and religious ostracism, imposed by their slaveholding neighbours, followed and lasted for close to a century. Not until 1862 did the United States recognise Haiti. What country that profited from slavery could dare to be a good neighbour? The Vatican did not sign a concordat with the new nation until 1860.
   After the Revolution, the Haitian people were left to build all the national institutions that a state requires. The term ‘institution’ is used here in a simple way: organisations for the conduct of a society’s social life, whether economic, political, or cultural. This includes a postal system, a system of education, a health system, even a system of roads. Institutions in pre-revolutionary St Domingue—the colonial name of the territory—served only the one-fifteenth of the population that was free.
   After the Revolution, those institutions had to be created anew by Haiti’s citizens—slaves before and now free, perhaps two-thirds of them Africa-born. In their struggle to build a state, the Haitians were obliged to pay 150 million Francs in onerous ‘indemnities’ to the French, on the grounds that the former slaves had until recently been the property of those they defeated. This added burden was backed by the threat of re-invasion. The indemnities were the price of diplomatic recognition by France; debt service would keep the Haitians in economic crisis until the twentieth century.
   A country wracked by more than a decade of invasion and revolution, then faced with financial punishment and isolation for scores of years, could not build the internal framework a strong civil society requires. This new, impoverished nation, endowed with a deeply divided class structure and seeking to survive with only the feeblest of institutions, was befriended by no one. Over time, that comfortable phrase—‘misrule, poverty, and political strife’—now used to explain everything in Haiti, became more and more applicable.
   For now, it is enough to focus on Haiti’s horrifying and urgent needs. But there should come an opportunity for the world to address seriously the broad challenges the country faces. Those challenges will be better understood if the distinctive, historically endowed character of the Haitian people is recognised.
   Boston Review, January 22. Sidney Mintz is research professor of Anthropology at Johns Hopkins University.

Save its image before it vanishes
away like bubble

The state run Bangladesh Television’s (BTV) impartiality is under threat. It has been manipulated by ruling parties again and again. Day by day it loses its audience and credence.
   Parliamentary standing committee mentioned the naked truth but the question is how long we need to wait to have a credible BTV. People have no cable access in remote areas. Thus they are bound to depend on BTV for news updates. But BTV always sings the song of ruling parties.
   The programme quality is not praiseworthy at all. It hardly maintains time schedule. Presentation style is obsolete. Every political party promises to make BTV a modern channel providing news, entertainment and education. But it remains a nightmarish experience watching BTV.
   Monzur Shohag
   Via e-mail

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