Back in Edinburgh – cold (4 deg C), grey, and light drizzle – and refreshed after two nights’ sleep. Both nights have been full of vivid dreams about Bangladesh, as though my unconscious hasn’t yet made the leap back to Scotland.

And what a leap that is. I have never felt such regret at the end of a holiday before. Bangladesh could be the setting for the garden of Eden. A land where you can grow a huge variety of crops all year round (Islam’s constant refrain “it grows anywhere in Bangladesh… so sweet… so juicy…”), and where the annual flood washes away last year’s agricultural sins and replaces them with a new layer of rich, fertile soil.

And the people – over the centuries, various waves of settlers have swept into this agricultural paradise to give a wonderful ethnic variety. Buddhists, Muslims, Christians, and no doubt others all contribute to the religious mix. What an example to the rest of the world, that diversity can create this friendly, smiling, immensely hospitable people, bound by a common tongue and proud of having won their Liberation in 1971.

Beautiful people in a beautiful country – but so many of the former (the population has doubled since Liberation, and is now twice that of the UK) and so little of the latter (just over half the size of the UK). Taking the dog for a run in the Pentlands yesterday I looked across the miles of empty moorland. Contrast this with Bangladesh, where there are people everywhere. As we sped along the roads or squeezed down village lanes, there was a constant stream of people on foot, on bikes, on rickshaws, in buses, cars, lorries… and looking out of the coach windows, the fields were dotted with vivid splashes of colour, marking people busy at work.

So, to the international community, Bangladesh is a “problem”, and there are plenty of volunteers to address it. One statistic the CIA World Factbook does not provide is the density of NGOs per square km (Non-Governmental Organisations – like UNICEF, the World Bank, etc). I reckon that Bangaldesh must be at the top of the league. As a westerner, locals start off the conversation by asking which NGO you are working for. And no wonder – given the amazingly low cost of living, an expatriate salary buys a very comfortable life in Bangladesh.

Perhaps this is an unduly cynical view, but the high road to disaster in Bangladesh does seem to have been built by NGOs – no doubt financed by a loan from the World Bank, still being paid off from local taxation long after the high road has been washed away in the monsoon.

Examples are everywhere. High Yield Varieties of rice came with lofty promises of increased production with winter cropping, but required chemical fertilizers, pesticides, mechanical irrigation and mechanized tilling. Initially successful, this over-intensive exploitation of the soil has led to rapidly declining fertility and decreasing yields; the use of fertilizer and pesticides has increased 400% per acre, while its cost increased 600% during the last two decades. An ever worse example: in an attempt to deliver clean drinking water, NGOs persuaded Bangladesh to drill around 11 million tubewells. Unfortunately, these have proved to be contaminated with arsenic, with between 25-36 million people estimated to be at risk of poisoning. The problem was identified in 1993, but the pumps are still in use.

These issues are well aired in the free and highly vocal local press. While we were there the papers were railing against a fertiliser scandal. The government awards the contract for importing fertiliser on some less-than-transparent basis. As demand reaches its annual peak, fertiliser mysteriously goes into short supply, forcing prices to rocket. The farmers, who have followed the best advice from the development NGOs, are distraught.

This conventional hi-tech approach to development clearly plays into the hands of the power-brokers within Bangladesh, reinforcing its unenviable position as the most corrupt country on earth. This is despite having a lively parliamentary democracy – although it’s questionable how long that will survive given the growing cynicism of the population.

It is not surprising that organisations like UBINIG are turning their backs on this, and advocate instead organic farming supplemented by intermediate technology rural development. However, it is hard to see this rural idyll winning the hearts and minds of the local population while the dreamland of Reeboks and Coca-Cola is pushed relentlessly at them by the West. As one passing Bangladeshi told us: you live in heaven, we live in hell. Talking about rising stress levels and declining “happiness indices” in the West didn’t make a convincing reply.

So, I’m deeply grateful to all the wonderful people I met in Bangladesh – those formally involved in the tour and those who we just happened to meet. The tour lived up to its title – People to People – and there was no doubt about the positive impact that Fairtrade is having on the people fortunate enough to work as producers. Our driver struggled to find Eastern Screen Printers, hidden down a back lane in the bustling city of Saidpur, yet through the marvel of Fairtrade these 35 producers are running an international business.

However, the projects are so few, and the number of people in the country is so great, that is difficult to come away full of confidence for the future. Maybe we have to trust in “pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will”. My ancestral homeland, Ireland, moved from being a poverty-stricken, famine- and emigration- prone island with unaffordably large families to a modern affluent society of around 4 million people in a century or so. It would be truly miraculous if the lovely green country of Bangladesh and its marvellous people could do something similar.

This entry was posted on Saturday, March 18th, 2006 at 5:28 pm and is filed under Fairtrade. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.