The coastal crisis (November 2007)

By Mohiuddin Ahmad

Food security

The finance and planning adviser AB Mirza Azizul Islam on Monday ruled out the possibility of crop-damage caused by the cyclone having any severe impact on the national economy. He mentioned that 'Aman is not now the major crop in Bangladesh. Since agriculture contributes only 22 per cent to the gross domestic product, damage to the Aman crop will not have a significant effect on our economy' (New Age, 22 November).

This is a problem with old-fashioned bureaucrat-economists who never think down to earth and refuse to learn from ground realities. Here I like to emphasize two points.

First, Aman (monsoon rice) may not be the number one crop in the country anymore. But any sensible person who has minimum knowledge of the coastal zone of Bangladesh will agree that it is the most critical and important crop along the coast. Here soil salinity of land is high and Aman grows in abundance. Aman is mostly rain-fed and the salinity level goes down in the monsoon season. In most of the offshore islands and chars, farmers hardly grow boro (winter rice) or aush (summer rice). We are not talking about Dinajpur or Mymensingh districts. We are talking about the coastal districts. That's why coastal dikes are so important, as they protect agriculture land and mature rice crops in the field from post-monsoon saline intrusion. I suggest Mr Azizul Islam to keep aside the national data of the Bangladesh Bureau of Statistics and look at the disaggregate data at the bottom.

The second point is that even if a country has enough foodgrains at the macro level, many people starve at the household level, as they don't have money to buy from the market (the miracle of free market economy doesn't work here), or don't have enough connections to obtain a Vulnerable Group Feeding card. To have effective food security, one need not have to grow enough foodgrains. If one has enough money to by it from the local or the global market, food security is ensured. The UK or South Korea can do it. We cannot.
   We are not blaming the finance adviser or the government he serves for causing the cyclone. But why does he have to make excuses if some dislocations occur and a crisis situation takes place after a disaster of such a massive scale? Let's face the reality that we are indeed in a crisis and we need to overcome it through our collective efforts and wisdom.

Vulnerability

According to the 2001 population census, about 12 million people live in the exposed coast of Bangladesh comprising 49 sea-facing upazilas/thanas. Most of them live in chars (newly accreted land) and islands in vulnerable conditions.

Because of severe river erosion, landlessness and the natural process of pauperization, many people resort to autonomous settlement in vulnerable areas. Besides, many people use remote and isolated areas as transit points for their livelihood activities, such as, fishing, fish drying, etc. Dublar Char, Char Feshon, Char Osman are few such areas. These people are virtually outside the network of any support system that can be of some help at times of disaster. It is logistically impossible to evacuate people from vulnerable chars and islands before the disaster, even if there are warnings. The people have to cope with the imminent disaster with whatever means they have. The issue is not to have a full-proof evacuation system, which is too ambitious, but to take measures that contribute to enhancing coping capacity of the people to deal with disasters, so that deaths can be avoided, damages can be minimized and the recovery after the disaster becomes faster. Food must reach the affected areas immediately after the disaster.

Disaster management

We live with cyclones. We blamed the apathy of the Pakistani authorities for not taking care of the issue with importance. Unlike General Yahya Khan, our leaders now visit the affected areas in helicopters and bagful of relief goods are thrown to the crowd from the sky. People desperately compete with each other to grab one bag. Obviously women, children and the disabled cannot do that. Is it a civilized way of giving succour?

Why do we have to rush from Dhaka with relief goods? Why have we not developed storage and distribution infrastructure at the district level? Why do we have so many cars for the patrician public servants (including the advisers) in the capital and not enough speedboats available to the district administration, which can be used during emergencies? Why do we need to maintain a highly centralized Chief Adviser's Relief Fund, instead of localizing it at the district and upazila level?

For poor people, vulnerability is both a condition and a determinant of poverty, and refers to the ability of people to avoid, withstand or recover from the harmful impacts of factors that disrupt their lives and that are beyond their immediate control. This includes shocks (sudden changes such as natural disasters, conflict or collapsing market prices), seasonality (low demand for farm labor between plantation and harvesting periods) and trends (gradual environmental degradation, oppressive political systems or deteriorating terms of trade). In the coastal zone of Bangladesh, a wide range of vulnerabilities is identified (Ref. ICZMP, 2003). These are:

• the threat of cyclones and storm surges that causes deaths and destruction;
• the threat of land erosion that causes untold sufferings and dislocation;
• deterioration and the declining viability of many distinctive and threatened coastal ecosystems;
• widespread poverty, limited livelihoods opportunities (especially outside agriculture) and poorly developed economic linkages;
• poor levels of service provision that make the isolation of many coastal areas worse;
• highly unequal social structures, with a small powerful elite dominating the mass of people, allied to high levels of conflict and poor law and order;
• changing patterns of land use (including the growth of shrimp and salt production) that are affecting the coast's morphology and water resources characteristic;
• resource degradation; and
• poor access to many forms of infrastructure and technologies;

These vulnerabilities affect the livelihoods of coastal communities. Their significance, however, vary greatly between localities, occupational groups and sexes. Also important is the ways in which vulnerabilities interact with each other, with most coastal households, and especially the poor, facing multiple vulnerabilities that compound each other in terms of both the impact of specific events and the capability to recover from these events when they do strike. For example, the poor infrastructure and remoteness of many coastal localities means that the immediate impact of a major cyclone is likely to be more severe and relief efforts are hampered. Subsequently, when the survivors are rebuilding their livelihoods after the disaster, poor access to market, credit and other services, institutional weaknesses and the deterioration of the coastal resource base delay and hamper the recovery process.

Why do we have to wait for a disaster to happen? Why don't we prepare ourselves before, knowing well that we have been living in a cyclone-prone region for centuries? Mr Azizul Islam and others who are now the 'guardians' of the state must answer.

The writer is the chairperson of CDL presently teaching at Sungkonghoe University, Seoul. This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it