Hot Hot Hot and high high high food prices

Am I in an Oven?

It’s getting hot. I’ve been thinking this for a while, but now it’s a thumping head ache and is often accompanied by a weak pleading croak of ‘hot, need water!’ People say you can fry an egg on the sidewalk during hot summers in New York, I expect Bangladeshis could roast a blue whale such is the heat here. I have been in heat before but only as a traveller when the promise of a beautiful monument or view meant the heat was less noticed, or even better, a refreshing ocean was just a few metres away. This time, I’m living in it and attempting to work in it. The heat affects everything you do. I don’t want to go outside, walks to the internet, to buy cooking oil, washing up liquid, soap, matches – I attempt to put them off. I now have to rise at 6am to run before it becomes too hot, even then I return feeling like I’ve had a bucket of sweat thrown over me, my whole body drenched (that’s a nice image for you) and frantically I try to replace my water levels.

After lunch is the worst. With the temperature at its midday beast, you sit trying to digest your carbo heavy dal and rice meal, attempting to focus on your work, sweating, heart fast and occasionally shallow panting like a hot dog. There are less people on the streets and markets are now only really busy at night. Walking between 8am and 6pm is only for the brave (or unfortunate poor) and rickshaw is the only option unless you want to arrive at your destination looking like a piece of seaweed. To add to this is the increasing regularity of power failures – with the rise in temperatures more people are switching on fans (or even air-con for the lucky few, not me), meaning that the local electricity grid often reaches capacity and is switched off. The result – work? – you have 30 minutes of normal brain activity before it shuts down and all you can think is it’s hot and stare at the fan waiting for it to start revolving again, Sleep? You can try but often your sheets are damp with sweat and even on hot nights with the fan it creates such a noise your sleep is disturbed anyhow. So you sit and wait, stationary, in status existence feeling the drops of sweat pour off you. When the power returns there is always a huge cheer from around the neighbourhood, every time!

My dress style has also changed. Normally, I try to resist the urge to start dressing like the locals as most males (noted – all VSO female here look great in their local dress) look a bit odd when wearing the local garb. However, need dictates that I have to adapt to the heat and so I have started wearing a lungi about the house – a type of Bengali sarong. It is fastened by a large knot at the front below the stomach which took me about 2 weeks of staring at men’s crotch areas to understand, yet, now I swish about in new found comfort, and don’t care about my strange appearance.

The above paragraphs were first written 2 weeks ago, since which there has been little change in the temperature and now humidity has joined the party of unwelcome weather conditions. So now, to add to a heat which feels like someone has turned a giant magnified death ray on you, comes an air which is pregnant with heavy moisture. You can’t freely breath it, it’s more of a suck and swallow. The sweating has become worse. If you are away from a breeze for more than 5 minutes you start to resemble a small water feature. On your return to your house you peel the sodden clothes of you, surprised and scared by how much they resemble a wet suit. I have decided to spare you the pictures! As I type this the ‘monsoon’ season is arriving, there are increasing rain storms where rain drops the size of conkers plod down and within 30 minutes the surrounding area is flooded. Gonna get my self a boat.

 

Below are a few pictures from a local Buddhist festival to celebrate the Buddha attaining enlightenment.

 

Food problems and rising prices hit Bangladesh hard

 

There are people queuing for food. Not the standard two or three person queues at either one of the new plush supermarkets or in the more traditional open markets. Instead, people are queuing for often over a hundred metres, spending hours waiting in the hot sun to be able to buy rice, and other essentials such as oil and salt, from the government administered distribution points at subsidised prices. As well as the unfortunate chronic poor (or as some people strangely term them the hardcore) who suffer from constant malnutrition, the working class and the middle class are being hit by the rise on global food prices. I’m not sure how much the issue has been in the news in the UK but here in Bangladesh the issue is vying with cricket and the future of the country’s democracy.

Poor people have to spend a large amount of their income on food, often 70-80%. Therefore, when food prices rise, even by a seemingly small amount, the result is that the disposable income of the poor disappears and soon the poor have to start reducing their food intake and the food they do take is often less nutritional. ‘Non’ essential items such as education and medication are also quickly given up. In the UK and other industrialised countries people may complain about the price of petrol going up by 5p, or having to buy the cheaper version of boutique bread, here children, mostly girls, are pulled out of school, medicines cannot be purchased, fewer vegetables, meat and fruit are bought. Such effects can have long term impacts, so much so that the President of the World Bank estimated that a further 100 million people may slide into poverty, wiping out 7 years worth of development gains. A child will now no longer be educated at school reducing their chances of getting a job in the future, people will be unable to work due to poor health and low energy levels. Watching people queuing gives this all a stark reality, chances of progress will have to be shelved whilst people queue for food, and eat less of it. How, especially in a country like Bangladesh where rice is everywhere, can such a thing happen? If you are interested, I’ll try to give you a brief explanation:

1. Rising living standards in China and India, and other countries where the middle classes are rapidly expanding, increases the demand for meat, livestock and the feed needed – 1 kg of beef requires 10 Kg of feed, and 100,000 litres of water. Just think, tens of millions of more people are starting to live the resource hungry existence of the industrialised countries. So, rather than using crops to feed humans, the crops are more profitably (financially anyway) used to feed cows so people can have steak and burgers. It’s estimated that it would require 6000 slaves to keep a UK person at the same life style level of 2008 if they lived before modern technologies in the time of the Roman Empire, now those slaves are just spread out around the world.   

2. Increased mandates for bio-fuels which are now grown on land previously used for food production reducing the amount of food grown. The industrialised countries conscious is clean of worries about climate change, the non-industrialised plate is empty. By 2010 30% of the US corn crop will be used for bio-fuels.

3. Subsidies protecting agriculture in industrialised countries have made it less profitable for non-industrialised countries to invest in agriculture reducing the efficiency and output of this sector in non-industrialised countries.

4. High Oil prices influenced by the war on ‘terror’, speculation in the financial markets and increasing demands for fertilizer to grow the crops to feed the livestock to feed the rich. This means the costs of planting, growing, harvesting and processing food has increased.

5. The rise in global population gives us the simple fact that there are simply more mouths to feed and this puts pressures on resources of all kinds – land, food, water, energy.

6. Poor Harvests in Australia due to drought and also in Asian countries due to a multitude of severe climate conditions (the reasons for this lead into a whole new argument) means less food had been produced.

There are other contributing reasons to, and I apologise if I have been too brief, but I just wanted to get across the various impacts that people who live in a resource exploitative and unsustainable way in industrialised countries have on the fight against poverty. Yes, we wear wrist bands, give a few quid to the collection box, perhaps recycle stuff but is there any real attitude and behaviour change in our relationship to poor beyond one of sympathy rather than the needed one to respect and partnership. It’s tough when you arrange the weekly rights training workshop only to find out that half the women can no longer attend as they have to work longer in the fields or tailors shop. Or that the village school has does not have any girl students as their parents do not have the available money to buy her uniform and books, all because some folk want to have more luxurious lives.

Below are a few pictures of the visit of a fellow VSO from Uganda – Morrish to Bandarban. He is one of the few Africans to have visited Bandarban and the locals were fascinated by him.