Oct 10, 2005
Seeing Bangladesh from the air, you could be forgiven for believing the country was awash. Neither the Bay of Bengal, nor the many branches of the Ganges and the Brahmaputra appear to have any actual boundaries, simply merging into the lakes and swamps and into the rice crops on the sunken islands. Further from the sea, the green checkerboard of rice fields takes on more of a park-like aspect, but even there, when the sun strikes at the right angle, you can see water glistening about the roots of the crop. Roads, where they exist, run along embankments of mud dredged up from the adjacent swamp so that rice gives way to open water all along the edge of the roadway. Fishing nets, suspended gracefully from long elegantly curved bamboo poles, are submerged at intervals in this long canal, to be raised from time to time with their shimmering harvest.
Slender boats ease their way along these canals, their pointed bow and stern drawn up to support a platform on which the boatman stands wielding his long pole, as gracious and as timeless as Sinbad the sailor.
The roads connect villages, likewise crowded onto mounds of mud dredged from the swamp, incidentally creating the village fishpond and wash place. Mango trees and bananas shelter the thatched huts and “go-downs”, (storage huts), while neatly thatched stacks of rice straw surround an area of beaten mud where the rice harvest is threshed and dried before being stored in the go-downs. It is all so eternal. Fish and rice and fruit are their sustenance; rice straw is their fuel, their shelter and their bedding. When we western prodigals have stripped the earth of its irreplaceable resources, we shall have to come begging to these people to teach us the secrets of survival in perpetuity.
We landed at Dakha airport with the customary screech of rubber and flutter of air brakes. I was a little surprised to see a dozen or so MiG 19 fighters parked around the perimeter, their snub noses craning forward as if anxious for stoush. Closer examination however revealed that several of them had engine hatches and canopies missing and that “mile-a-minute” vines were climbing the legs of some of them. They must have been the remnants of the Soviet support that had driven the Pakistanis out. Their fighting days were over and they were being pirated for spare parts. Later though, as we were carrying our hand baggage across the tarmac, a flight of three operational ones came screaming out of the distance and landed at terrifying speed, in a flurry of parachutes which burst from their tails and brought them abruptly to taxiing speed. Apparently some military capacity remained, and someone was finding the foreign exchange to pay for the fuel.
We were met in the arrivals hall by a mousy but vivacious little lady from the New Zealand embassy in Delhi. She had arranged a rental car for us, and with her thorough knowledge of the idiosyncrasies of the Indian subcontinent, she was a very welcome guide.
In Dakha the whole town smells of mildew, and most of the buildings, other than the Intercontinental Hotel of course, are smeared and streaked with black mould. The roads are alive with trishaws, brightly painted as are the buses. One of the kids that pedal them told us he had to do five miles with a passenger to earn enough to pay the hire of his vehicle for the day. There are so many of them that some must often do a day’s work for nothing, or even at a loss.
Among the trishaws there are ox carts with clumsy home made looking wheels, pushed or pulled not by oxen, which are presumably too expensive to buy or feed, but by men. It is amazing what these wiry little guys can shift. I have seen two of them pushing a cart with a well balanced load of bagged cement that must have weighed close to two tons. Of course the roads are dead flat, but still… Maneuverability seemed to be a bit of a problem, and I don’t like to think what would have happened if they had met some dumb Pakeha in a fast car at an intersection. Evasive action would be mighty slow, and stopping would be out of the question. The same was probably true of a trishaw when it is carrying two fat passengers. The Embassy lady said she was reluctant to ride in a trishaw after she’d seen how little was left of one that had collided with a car.
Bangladesh from the road still looks very flat and swampy. Even in Dakha the land seems to be only a few metres above the water table. As a result any area where you can keep your feet dry is likely to be heavily utilised . Many of the rural roads have half or more of their width occupied by rice spread out to dry. The multicoloured buses avoid it if they can but if two of them meet, one is obliged to swish through the grain, which is then returned to its former arrangement by patient ladies with short handled witches’ brooms.
The country was probably always short of bridges, for the rivers are not only very wide, but have such indefinite boundaries. They also have a tendency to change their courses in times of flood. What bridges they formerly had were blown by the departing Pakistanis. So ferries are the predominant means of crossing water, and when we went by car to Comilla we crossed on a barge which was driven by a launch strapped to one side of it. It was not a particularly nimble arrangement, but for a slow flowing river close to two miles wide nimbleness was perhaps not a significant issue. The crossing must have taken the best part of an hour, and a little girl passenger in a threadbare dress took the opportunity to wash our car for us. She didn’t ask if we wanted it washed, nor did she ask for payment when she had finished. She just dipped a piece of rag , scarcely more dilapidated than what she was wearing, into the river and got on with it. The barge only had a few inches of freeboard so even a kid of seven or eight could easily reach the water. She did a good job of it, and when she had finished I gave her a coin worth about 30 cents, reckoning it was rather less than I’d have given my own kids to hose our car down, but then this was the third world. It was evidently more than she expected as she hurried over to some other kids to show it to them, and you could see by their excited chatter that they were impressed. Then came back to the car and put her little arm through the window and gravely shook hands with me. A ragamuffin kid of about eight! What poise and graciousness! We had everything and she had nothing, but she could teach us a thing or two.
At Comilla we met the local agricultural officer, who showed us around his patch, told us what the problems were, and what he was trying to do with them. He seemed to know what he was talking about and to have a genuine desire to improve the lot of the farmers. However he was poorly equipped, having only a bicycle to carry him around his district and he had no regular contact with the administration in Dakha. He said that pest control on rice was not usually a big deal, but there were occasional problems with a little spiny beetle, Dicladispa armigera, that stripped the surface of rice leaves. We saw a farmer wading through his rice crop working a hand operated knapsack sprayer, and the agricultural officer said the beetle was what he would be after.
We later stopped to talk to a guy with a shiny little motor bike, who turned out to be a Shell Chemicals rep. I asked him what chemical the farmer would have been using and he said it would be dichrotophos or monocrotophos. These were not insecticides I was familiar with, but when I got home I looked them up, and found that they were not only extremely toxic to humans, either when swallowed or by contact through the skin, but they were also highly toxic to fish. In a country where the people lived on the fish that swam among their rice fields, and where the farmer sprayed the chemical while up to his knees in water, they didn’t seem to be a very happy choice, but perhaps it was easier to sell such chemicals to peasants in Bangladesh then to more sophisticated farmers in Europe or America. Was the cost perhaps being subsidised by some country’s aid budget?
The agricultural officer took us to see a go-down full of defunct motorised knapsack sprayers which he said had been given as aid by the government of Czechoslovakia. There must have been more than a hundred of them. A disconsolate fellow was patiently trying to pirate bits off some of them in the hope of restoring a few usable ones, but as they appeared to be of at least ten or twelve different makes, I wondered how much success he was having. Were these sprayers perhaps the ends of several lines which the manufacturers had discontinued, and had they perhaps convinced their government to take them off their hands and offer them as aid?
In Samoa we had developed a bellows type arrangement for applying insecticide dusts to crops. It worked very well and cost practically nothing. You could make one for the cost of a handful of clout tacks and a teaspoon of glue. It was constructed from the ends of a fruit box, two pieces of bamboo stem, and a short length of discarded inner tube from a truck tyre. You put a few cupfuls of insecticidal dust, (containing say 1% or 2% of malathion or DDT), into it and used it to blow the dust onto whatever crop you were wanting to protect – no water to carry, and minimal pollution of the water or soil underneath the crop. I put one together to show to Foreign Affairs and to the American group we met up with there. They liked the look of it. Aid to the Third World doesn’t need to be expensive or high-tech. In fact it is better if it isn’t.
I thought again about the enormous old Pye computer which the senior entomologist had shown me occupying a fair proportion of the floor space of his little laboratory in Dakha. It too was a gift, this time from the British government. It had been built with valves, before the days of transistors, and when the fluctuating Bangladeshi power supply had blown its valves, which it did almost as soon as they plugged it in, there were no replacements to be had. So it remained there, taking up space, and achieving nothing. It would have been more use on the bed of the river as a mooring. I wonder how much similar superfluous junk is decorating the Third World? “It is better to give than to receive”.
Then at Chittagong, we observed that one of the few wharves not rendered inaccessible by the sunken hulks of bombed ships, was cluttered with many drums of sprouting wheat. We were told it was a gift from some American philanthropic ladies’ group, but it had no plant health certification, and as the Bangladeshis were trying to establish wheat crops in their drier northern districts, they were reluctant to let it be used as seed for fear it might start them off with a collection of American cereal diseases. It could of course have been used as food, but as the only trucks available to transport it belonged to merchants who had already paid for local grain on which they hoped to make a profit, they were in no hurry to distribute free grain to their potential customers. With the best will in the world you can create more problems than you solve.
Yet the villagers we met, boiling their rice and fish in a spherical aluminium pot over a hole in the ground in which they had lit a few handfuls of rice straw, greeted us cheerfully and without resentment, even offering us their little suede leather hands to shake. I remarked to one of them that when we in the west had burned up the world’s oil and coal, perhaps we could come to Bangladesh for advice on how to live with what was left. He smiled his Bangladeshi smile.