The Gathering Storm

(Page 3 of 5)

Three months later, these villages remain half-crippled by the aftermath of the storm. Scores of palm trees are still down, splayed like pick-up sticks across fishponds and graveyards. It takes me a moment to realize that the skeletal piles of kindling submerged in the small tidal channels used to be fishing boats. Though the floodwaters drained off quickly, many of the fields are still tainted by salt. The rice and vegetable crops are coming in, but the yield is way down. All the sources of drinking water are brackish, adds a younger man in a blue lungi, the wraparound, calf-length skirt that most Bangladeshi men wear in preference to trousers.

The conversation turns to the weather more generally, and the villagers talk not only of the magnitude of the changes, but of their strangeness. At nine in the morning, we were shivering on the foredeck of the Bonbibi, wrapped in sweaters and jackets against the surprising chill. Winter -- the dry season -- has lasted a month longer than usual this year, punctuated by sudden freak downpours. The people here are plagued by familiar ailments -- headaches, vomiting, diarrhea, fatigue, the raging fevers and bone-numbing chills of malaria. But these afflictions are coming at unaccustomed times of the year.

The one thing that these villages have going for them, however, is that a good-size freshwater river, the Bhola, is of some help in keeping the worst of the salt at bay. If we want to see the full extent of the saline drama, we'll need to travel a little farther south and west. In particular, says Khushi Kabir, the longtime head of Nijera Kori ("Doing It Ourselves"), one of the country's most influential nongovernmental organizations, we should look at the shrimp farms. The suggestion is of more than passing interest, since the shrimp at the seafood counter of your local supermarket is quite likely to have begun life in these salty fields.

At Mongla, a scruffy river port with a harbor full of rusted freighters, we exchange the modest comforts of the Bonbibi for an aged blue Land Rover with no air-conditioning and not much in the way of suspension.

Drive through almost any country in the world and there will be intervals of respite from the press of population. A forest, a range of hills or mountains, a stretch of rock and desert. Not so in the area of Bangladesh that encircles the Sundarbans. Here, the journey induces a peculiar kind of claustrophobia, with no break from either people or land under one form of cultivation or other. Every mile is a white-knuckle game of chicken. Brightly painted trucks adorned with folk-art carvings go head-to-head with careening buses, headlights on full beam, hands on the horn, passengers clinging to the roof for dear life. It's a crude Darwinian contest; biggest always wins.

Rickshaws, bicycles, motorbikes, and motorized trishaws engage meanwhile in their own Nascar-style adventures. Overloaded flatbed bicycle carts are heaped high with firewood, 20-foot culms of bamboo, sacks of rice, cooking pots, hay bales, teetering pyramids of cooking oil tins, people. Right in front of us, the imbalance of weight is just too much for one small cart, which abruptly tips over, catapulting the driver backward into the air like a circus performer shot from a cannon and sending his 10 passengers, including a frail-looking elderly woman, sprawling onto the highway and into the oncoming traffic. Our driver hits the brakes. The old woman picks herself up, dusts herself off, and starts all over again, reattaching herself to the mass of humanity and livestock that wanders randomly across the blacktop: scrawny goats, undernourished cattle, chicken, geese, dogs, children, old men with white beards hobbling along on canes, day laborers in their lungis, women in rainbow saris. The farther south we go, the more the saris give way to the black burkas of conservative Islam.

As we enter the bustling little town of Shyamnagar, another bicycle cart meanders past. Behind the driver, on the wooden flatbed, a bearded man shouts into a deafening pair of loudspeakers, painted blue and green.

"What was that all about?" I ask Benedict Poresh Sardar, who works with Uttaran, the most important of the NGOs active in this area.

"He said if you give money to the madrassa, you will go straight to heaven," Poresh replies.

A few hundred yards later, another loudspeaker blasts invitations to an Islamic gathering. A crowd of teenage boys blocks the roadway, collecting funds for their school.

"The madrassa is a religious school that teaches boys only," Poresh complains. "There are many more of these schools than before, more all the time. The main thing they do there is read and memorize the Koran. In Arabic. The government encourages them to teach modern and general education too. But..." He frowns, then shrugs. I file away the thought for later.

English words have begun to crop up among the ornate Bengali characters on the roadside signboards: Prawn Hatchery, Gold Coin Aquaculture. Large-scale shrimp farming took off here in the 1980s in an effort to boost exports. By 2010, the Bangladeshi government hopes, it will bring in $1.5 billion a year.

The industry has transformed the life of villages like Burigoalini, which lies at the end of the road we're following-one of the last habitations on the northwestern fringe of the Sundarbans forest. Burigoalini is an old name, referring to a local woman who once had pastures here for milk cows, paddies for rice, and thriving fishponds. That kind of diversified farm economy no longer holds up around here. Instead, the landscape is dominated by a vast patchwork of flat water broken up by earthen embankments. Shrimp farms, as far as the eye can see. A modest number of people have made a good living from the industry, but many more have been left destitute. This is not a labor-intensive business.

"How do the big shrimp companies get hold of all this farmland?" I ask Poresh.

"They start by leasing it," he says. "Fifteen or twenty thousand takas -- $220 to $300 -- for a two-year lease on one biga of land [about half an acre]. Then they renew. Sometimes the industry brings in musclemen, backed by the two big political parties, so the poor farmers aren't given a choice."

"Meaning they use violence?" I ask.

He nods. "When they find it necessary."

We've reached the neighboring settlement of Tatinakhali now, leapfrogging our way across gaping holes in the raised mud path. We've been joined by Alok Kumar Halder, one of Uttaran's local representatives. He's a large, heavyset man, half as big again as most Bangladeshis. He wears a lime-green polo shirt with an Oxfam logo.

The shrimp farms depend on a steady supply of brackish water from the river, Alok tells me, pointing to the sluice gates that regulate the flow into the big, rectangular ponds. On the far side of the river,
100 yards away, the solid wall of forest begins. Tiger country.

The problem is, all that sodium from the river also seeps into the surrounding farmland, diminishing its fertility as well as the availability of grass for cattle grazing. The domestic food supply is being sacrificed on the altar of export earnings. The salinity of the soil in the Khulna area -- named for its administrative center, the third-largest city in Bangladesh -- has increased a staggering 80-fold since the 1970s. The productivity of the land has declined so much that Bangladesh now produces less than half as much rice per acre as China. Researchers are experimenting with new strains of saline-tolerant rice, but it's too early to tell how much this will help.

Uttaran has the broadest of agendas, working with the poorest communities of farmers, fishermen, woodcutters, and mowalis on matters as diverse as safe drinking water, access to land, legal aid, divorce, and domestic violence. The last of these is rampant, and like most of Bangladesh's woes it is aggravated by the degradation of the environment. In Tatinakhali, the paths are crowded with women and girls on their way to the sand-filter well in the next village, Kolbari, which purifies water drawn from the muddy fishponds. It's the only possible source: the groundwater is brackish, and the deep tube-wells tap into naturally occurring, and lethal, deposits of arsenic. Three miles there and back, three times a day, nine miles altogether under the burning sun, to collect enough heavy jars of water to supply a family's daily needs. And if, as a result, a woman is late preparing dinner, the frequent reward is a beating.

"When your husband does that, is there any remedy?" I ask Shajida, a charismatic woman in a purple sari who is one of the community's leaders. A neighbor's three small children linger shyly in the doorway behind her. Their father was eaten by a Bengal tiger three weeks ago.

Shajida offers the faintest of smiles. "Crying," she says.

"Is there anything you can do that will make your family's life easier?" I ask, anxious to change the subject.

She gestures at a small pond fenced off with reed matting. She's trying to raise crabs where rice used to grow.

"We're emphasizing that kind of adaptation," Shahidul Islam, Uttaran's founder and director, tells me later in Dhaka. Islam is a local man, the son of poor farmers in the small town of Satkhira, a few miles from the Indian border. He founded Uttaran in 1985, distressed by the social inequities he saw all around him. A year later he began to work on environmental issues. When the land flooded, he wondered if the root cause was something more than the rain. Something human-induced. Asking such troublesome questions has made him powerful enemies. In January 2007 two soldiers dragged him from his office and took him to a nearby army base, where he was blindfolded and beaten -- with a field-hockey stick, he thinks. They broke his foot, and he still walks with the trace of a limp. He spent a total of seven months in jail under the Special Powers Act, charged with "organizing landless people against the state."

I ask him what exactly he means by adaptation.

"Turning to fisheries in waterlogged areas," he replies. "Crab farming. Growing crops on the dikes. Floating vegetable gardens-some people call it hydroponics. Planting saline-tolerant rice, saline-tolerant reeds. Better house construction -- even the poor people are trying to build cyclone-proof houses with concrete pillars and concrete lintels." Some people take advantage of the microcredit loans for which Bangladesh is famous so that they can afford to lease the land themselves and preempt further incursions by the shrimp industry.

Continued...