| Bangladesh #1: Most crowded land on Earth, but is it over-populated? |
|
2009-01-01, 23:25 "You'll never be out of sight of another person." That's what a veteran journalist told me before I went to Bangladesh a few weeks ago. It can seem over-crowded, especially in the capital of Dhaka, where the population now tops out somewhere above 10 million and growing, as rural people leave the fields for work in the big city. The country's biggest slum (photo below) has countless tin shacks shoehorned into a small plot in the heart of the city. The area is so densely packed, and the trip across the river so short, that there seems to be a thriving business of boat taxis that ferry people from the shoreline you see in the photo below to the near shore, where there are fancy hotels, big buildings (like those in the photo, off in the distance), and lots of other places where some of the slum residents probably have jobs.
Or, when driving along country roads, where our huge, packed bus with its train-like horn blaring near constantly as it passes one after another bus, truck, rickshaw, bicycle, and lots of people walking, it can feel like there are too many people here. The country does have an astonishing 150 million people packed into an area the size of Iowa. If you exclude various tiny countries and city states, such as Bermuda, Singapore, and Vatican City, then Bangladesh is the most densely populated country on Earth. And yet the country now feeds itself. Can you imagine half the people in the US living off such a small area? It wouldn't be possible there, and it works in Bangladesh only because it's one of the most fertile spots on the planet, covered deep with rich sediments carried down from the crumbling Himalaya mountains. According to one of the aids to Sheikh Hasina (whose party won the elections in late December), during Hasina's term as prime minister from 1996 to 2001, "the national food deficit of 4.5 million metric tons was transferred into a 2.6 million metric ton food surplus." Pretty impressive. The country no longer deserves the reputation it long held as a "basket case." I can't count how many times people have immediately said "it's overpopulated" when I've told them I'm reporting on Bangladesh. But maybe the country is not overpopulated after all. The way they've been able to support all those people has been through big boosts in crop yields—especially rice, the national staple—from "green revolution" varieties of crops that require a lot of water and fertilizers.
This way of farming doesn't seem sustainable, though, so in that sense the country might be over-populated. But if we're using that measure, then the whole planet already has too many people, since both rich and poor are living in ways that are sucking up the planet's resources and spitting out pollution in ways that we can't continue for long without seriously undercutting people's livelihoods. It's ironic that in this post about how many people are in Bangladesh, my favorite photo of a rice field doesn't show anyone in it. But there were definitely people around. When my translator and I walked into this area, almost instantly we were trailed by about 15 kids. Here are a few of them:
They're standing in front of a special hut (click here to see another photo that shows the hut), built along traditional lines, but with a few modifications to (hopefully) make it stand up to cyclones. It's meant to be a cheap way of building stronger housing, with a concrete floor, steel siding along the base of the walls and the usual woven palm leaves above, and timber cross-beams to make it more wind resistant. A sign affixed to the house said it cost about $1,000, which would put it out of the league of most of the people who need it. But maybe people can figure out how to take ideas from this model house and do it themselves in a cheaper way. Approaches like this are definitely needed, since a lot of people can die in the storm surges during cyclones, as shown in this educational painting on the wall around a school. (It shows, for example, how if you're caught in the surge, you can try to save yourself by tying yourself to a tree.)
Stronger huts could help save a lot of lives, since a lot of people can die in the cyclones that rip through this country, with category-5 storms hitting every 10 years or so—and the number of such strong cyclones seems to be already becoming more common in this part of the world due to global warming. There are thousands of cyclone shelters around the country, funded by foreign aid, and while they've doubtless made an impact, they can house only a small fraction of all the people who need them. When we were traveling around, one thing that kept coming up was that people hope that more cyclone shelters can get built. One farmer said that if you try to go, there's a crush of people trying to get in, and most people don't, and then they have to go back to their homes. And the people who do get in are so crowded that some consider it demeaning. Sadly, instead of going to the shelter in that region, this farmer said, "I'd rather die in my own house." |
|||||||||
