Bangladesh: Erosion, Climate Change Create Refugees
Text by Chulie de Silva/Drik, Photographs by Saikat Mojumder/Drik for IPS Asia-Pacific

SIRAJGONJ, Bangladesh – Thirty-year-old Halima Begum sometimes sits on the banks of the river Jamuna in Vatpeyari village in this district, located some 157 miles from the Bangladesh capita of Dhaka, and ponders about the home she lost to river erosion.

This South Asian country’s rivers are intrinsically woven into and inseparable from the lives of many of the poor like Halima’s. Rivers nourish, providing rich deltas for cultivation and supporting livelihoods, but at times have become terminators that flood and erode villages and plunge the already poor into destitution.

The ones who are victims of climate change are paying for the sins of the affluent rich. But Halima is luckier than most, as she has a chance to rebuild her life.

Vatpeyari village is an intervention by the non-government organisation Practical Action to give back to the climate change refugee families a second chance to rebuild their shattered lives and go back to their familiar livelihoods – farming, fishing, livestock breeding and in some cases work as daily-paid labourers and lead a dignified life.

Poverty has many faces, many dimensions and getting the people to earn above the 1.25 U.S. dollar (approximately 92 taka ) poverty line, as stipulated in the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) amidst floods, cyclones and rising food prices, is not the end of the poverty reduction story. Asking what it means to be poor, they often say it is being hungry and sick, seeing children and relatives die in their arms for lack of medical care, inability to give their children a better life, and feeling vulnerable and despondent without any knowledge or means of bettering themselves.

Yet, the poor of Bangladesh have been its biggest asset. Migrant workers earn 12 billion dollars a year. The garment sector, whose backbone is the lowly paid worker, brings in 76 percent of the country’s foreign exchange. The farmer in the field feeds 160 million people.

Bangladesh has defined the national upper poverty line as minimum dietary energy requirement of 2122 Kcalories per day. This poverty line has been reduced from 56.6 percent in the base year 1990/91 to 38.7 percent as estimated in 2008, says the Bangladesh MDGs Progress Report of 2009. These statistical measures do not take into account the social, cultural and political aspects of poverty or the stigmatisation, and how the poverty of not having knowledge leads the poor to succumb to many ills, including violations of human rights. This has had many looking at alternative ways of defining and what it means to the people who are actually experiencing it.The “capability approach” put forward by Nobel Prize-winning economist Amartya Sen addresses poverty as the “deprivation of basic capabilities rather than merely lowness of income.”

Villages like Vatpeyari are blips on the poverty reduction maps. If the village becomes self sufficient in its food production and has access to water and sanitation facilities, it would be able to give back to the climate change refugees the capability they lost.And if the community can produce a generation of healthy and better educated young persons, that would be an example worthy of replicating. When this is a tall order, breaking it up into smaller manageable efforts can add up and improve the big picture of reducing poverty and hunger in Bangladesh. (END/IPS Asia-Pacific)