The New Nation - Internet Edition

EVERY day new information is received about loss of life and destructions from the very devastating cyclone that swept over Bangladesh on Thursday and Friday. Initial estimate was that the cyclone very badly battered 12 districts. But now, it is seen that the trail of destructions left by it include 24 districts or about one third of the country. Thus, the cyclone is considered to have impacted severely on the economy of the country and the life and living of people over a large part of it. There is no way to be casual about dealing with its after-effects. The cyclone came after countrywide floods had gripped the country only months ago and lingered. The cyclone coming in the wake of those means a double whammy on the economy in close succession. Thus, very focussed attention will have to be given -- sector by sector -- to recover from the ruinous consequences of the natural disasters.

It is pragmatic that the armed forces have been extensively deployed to help mitigate the cyclone-related sufferings, dislocations and damages. They have the training, logistical abilities and motivation to deal effectively with the post-cyclone scenario. But the civil administration must be prodded into delivering its best under the situation. The first tasks should be locating dead bodies and their burial. But simultaneously, and this is more significant, the greatest emphasis must be on locating the distressed people in the aftermath of the cyclone. The emergency need of food to last some days, fuel, safe water and essential medicine should be reached to them very quickly indeed. Medical teams will have to be dispatched and maintained round the clock in the affected areas. Tubewells should be sunk on highest priority basis in these areas to ensure safe water supplies. Water purification tablets should be amply distributed to prevent the outbreak of water-borne diseases.

Almost simultaneously emergency shelters such as tents must be provided to cyclone victims. The total number of the homeless will have to be quickly assessed to disburse grants among them at the fastest for rebuilding their homes. The nationalised banks and Krishi banks have the resources at their disposal for disbursement as agricultural loans. This should be done under a special programme at the soonest in the cyclone-hit areas for farmers to buy agricultural inputs and resume cultivation immediately to make up for the losses they suffered from the storm. The power sector, roads, embankments and other infrastructures have suffered huge damages. Recovery from these damages must be meticulously planned and executed within a short time-frame for creating conditions towards full recovery in the cyclone-affected districts.

THE Asia-Pacific water summit, first of its type, is going to be held in Japan early next month with a view to mobilising 'the political will' and 'commitment' to put water high up in the national agenda of the countries in the region. According to a recent media report, the first Asia-Pacific Water Summit will be held in Beppu in Oita prefecture of Japan on December 3 and 4 and around 300 people including top-level leaders from various sectors like industry, education, agriculture and local organisations besides media from 49 countries are expected to attend the summit and deliberate on 'Water Security: Leadership and Commitment'. Besides, stakeholders involved in water and sanitation issues including international organisations are expected to participate in the summit. As reported, the summit is being convened by the steering committee for the Asia-Pacific Water Summit and the Asia-Pacific Water Forum, under the chairmanship of former Japanese prime minister Yoshiro Mori, in collaboration with the APWF's governing council, chaired by Professor Tommy Koh, ambassador-at-large of Singapore.

Some issues of concern such as climate change, water sharing, water for development and ecosystem, water-related disaster management, developing knowledge and lessons increasing local capacity, monitoring investments and results, private sector water mandate will feature in the deliberations of the meet. Parallel to the regional water summit, an Open Event Forum will be held also in Beppu from December 1 to 5 preceding the two-day summit with broad participation from the civil society and stakeholders. The Asia-Pacific Water Forum is working to increase the region's access to improved water supplies and sanitation, protect and restore river basins, and reduce people's vulnerability to water disasters. The APWF champions efforts aimed at boosting investments, building capacity, public outreach and enhancing cooperation in the water sector at the regional level.

At present 700 million people of the Asia-Pacific region do not have access to safe drinking water and the region suffers disproportionately from water-related diseases, and degraded land-water ecosystems significantly threaten water productivity, as pointed out by Mr. Yoshiro Mori, who also asserts - 'We can turn the situation around if we can agree to make water a high priority in our development plans, if we acknowledge that the access to safe drinking water is a basic human right of our people.' It may be mentioned here that in calling for the creation of the APWF at the fourth World Water Forum in Mexico in 2006, the water ministers of the Asia-Pacific region sought to establish an effective mechanism to encourage more collaborative efforts on water resource management and to accelerate the process of effective integration of water resources. The Asia-Pacific water ministerial meeting also called upon the APWF to organise Asia-Pacific water summits to be held once every 2-3 years. Bangladesh, obviously, attaches much importance to such event as she herself experiences serious water issues and so far has failed to resolve collectively despite all her sincere efforts even with the help of the United Nations.

Maswood Alam Khan

Prices have spiraled up 14 percent for flour, 13 percent for soybean oil, 13 percent for powdered milk and 7 percent for sugar during the last two months, when there was ostensibly no visiting of warehouses and factories by personnel of BDR or joint armed forces and, according to press reports, when edible oils marketed were all adulterated to an extent of 70 percent.

This is puzzling, as we know 'prices of edibles in our country are always in inverse proportion to adulteration'. "Higher the adulteration, lower the price" is a market matrix known to us. Price of oil is supposed to be low or stable with such high rate of adulteration, irrespective of international price. Of course, uncanny traders nowadays---in a break of tradition---market their adulterated products with higher price tags, lest consumers take their products with lower price tags as shoddy.

People are identifying profiteering by a section of traders in general as the main culprit in the price crisis. Economists are pointing their accusing fingers at the imbalanced relationship between the amount of goods that are available and the amount that people want to buy. Traders are shouting about rising commodity prices in the international markets and the concomitant increase in their import cost. Monetarists are puzzled as to why American dollar is still robust in Bangladesh while the same hard currency has been diluted all over the world. Bankers are contemplating to open a spigot of our reserve tank to deluge the market with US Dollars in an attempt to bring about some kind of parity.

When politicians, economists and members of think tanks are tearing their hair out brooding over the price crisis and devising solutions on how to throttle back price spiraling some people, who constitute the majority of market stakeholders, are busy manicuring and grooming their mustaches and massaging their protruded bellies: they, the gurus in the world of adulteration, are chuckling at their ability of hoodwinking the consumers into buying whatever they are fancying. Their profit making is not predicated upon the law of supply and demand in the market; these adulteration nerds dictate the market by throttling up and down the quantity of adulterants being punched into edibles like oil, flour, ata, milk or medicines.

Foisting spurious and shoddy goods and edibles on consumers is not new in our society. Sellers used to display their products of different grades with price differentials. A steel almirah (cupboard), for example, made of sheets of thicker gauge was priced higher than those of thinner gauge. Shoppers with thinner wallets were content with cupboards of sleeker partitions made of iron sheets of thinner gauge. Sometimes, shop-owners even used to fill hollow panels of steel almirahs with sands and stones to make them weigh heavy. There were adulterated edibles too: like milk diluted with water or tea brewed with spent tea leaves etc. served in a tea stall to shortchange the customers. Both shoppers and sellers were not unhappy---in spite of adulteration that was not so malignant to human health. Life was easy, undemanding, silky and downy. But, never ever in those days edible oils were made cheaper and at the same time more delicious by punching into oils chemically treated spent lubricants.

Nowadays traders no more display their produces of different grades and qualities; they don't allow a buyer to leave their shops without his/her taking delivery of goods. First, they somehow sense the buyer's budgetary capability and then they accordingly force-supply the exact quantity of goods the buyer needs; the only difference the seller ensures is that of the quality. The lower the budget the higher the quantity of adulterants punched into edible oil or milk.

Every businessman knows that the possibility of incurring loss is minimal in two areas of business in our country: one is related to food and drink and the other drugs and medicines. Notwithstanding high import cost of medicinal raw materials and ever increasing price of locally available food grains medicines and food items manufactured and processed in Bangladesh are the cheapest in the world even compared to those in neighboring countries like Thailand.

The Bangladeshi secret behind roaring business on anything edible may be 'unbridled scope and lust for adulteration' whenever the fancy takes a processor of foods or a manufacturer of medicines who can easily hoodwink inspectors who are too few in numbers and who are too poorly equipped with logistics and equipment to detect adulteration. Many of today's manufacturers of foods and drugs would have been nonexistent if they had to shut up their departments of adulteration in their respective mills and factories.

While shopping we rely on what we see with our eyes, how our tongues taste an edible, how our noses sense the pungency of mustard oil, how our fingers feel the finesse of clothes or how heavy our hands feel the weight of an electronic gadget. We are too illiterate, poor, gullible and ignorant to verify the intrinsic genuineness of what we buy. Our judgmental capacity has been warped and stunned.

We are happily content as long as our stomachs remain stuffed with foods that ostensibly look good and fresh and taste delicious and our bodies infused with medicines that are packed in attractive foils and bottles. A poor rickshaw puller does not know that modern chemistry can transfuse animal urine into pure ghee. 15 million human mouths of our country have thus been turned into dumping pits for our unscrupulous businessmen and traders to foist upon their adulterated edible products.

Equipped with the cutting edge of technology, workforce of scientists and lessons learned from global swindlers unscrupulous businesspersons of our country have long been pumping in full throttle into the market adulterated edibles and spurious products in such subtle strategies that counterfeited and shoddy products look more attractive and taste more delicious than their genuine counterparts.

Many of such adulterers are camouflaging their clandestine operations behind the signboards of reputed companies who occupy primetimes of TV advertisements the way Managing Director of Hotel Purbani had his young paramours dancing and drinking all night and all day in his grand suites behind the smokescreen of VIP boarders of his multi-starred hotel.

With the joint forces and BDR personnel decelerating their operational speed in checking how our businessmen are adulterating consumer items in consideration of bringing about a semblance of confidence in markets at the behest of business doyens, the malaise of adulteration, which was about to be eradicated after the present caretaker government started campaigns against immoral businesses, has been left half-treated clearing the ways for the old traders to resume their businesses as usual. Adulterated edibles packed in attractive bottles and containers are thus reoccupying their old spaces in shelves of grocery shops and drug stores.

It is heartening to note that the government is going to form soon a 'Price Commission' to suggest ways and means to address the issue of spiraling prices. The government is also planning to resume mobile court drives with renewed vigor to ensure weight and quality of goods in trading.

Such simultaneous moves with pincers to control market and at the same time ensure quality of goods are the best way to reassure the public about genuine goods at fair prices. But, in reality the government, with poor logistics, cannot really afford to check each and every shop in urban and rural areas to measure the quality of the edibles and it would be unrealistic to expect an overnight metamorphosis in the quality of government-sponsored inspections of foods and drugs to rid the nation of the malaise of adulteration.

Adulteration of food items and counterfeiting of other consumer products are the easiest ways to make money from in a country like Bangladesh where police forces equipped with hackneyed 3not3 rifles moving in rickshaw vans at a snail's pace have to brave terrorists equipped with the latest automatic machine guns moving in robust speeding jeeps.

Decades back, the only instrument the food inspectors used to carry was a lactometer, a hydrometer to test specific gravity of milk based on Archimedes principle. But today's adulteration chemists know how to fool the hydrometer into measuring the correct specific gravity of milk by removing the milk fat and replacing it with fats from coconut oil or palm oil. In this nuclear age scientists equipped with the latest laboratory instruments are necessary to detect hi-fi adulteration of foods and medicines.

We have achieved phenomenal successes in controlling terrorismAdulteration is more dangerous a terror to our life than JMB. Only death or fear of death can stop adulteration. A few deaths in summary trials or crossfire encounters may send a real signal for adulteration nerds to rethink before they switch on their blending machines next time.

There is a glorious opportunity now for us to estimate correctly the extent of adulteration we have been used to, if the present caretaker government---which has no political ambition---moves all their forces against adulteration even at the cost of further spiraling of prices of edibles and non-edibles.

We should educate ourselves that a rise in price is not that bad if the oil, flour or milk we are consuming is pure and that abnormally low prices of edibles compared to their international prices is a dangerous signal. We should not mind consuming half the quantity of oil and milk at double the price if only we are sure that the oil we are frying vegetables with is genuine and the milk we are feeding our babies is unadulterated.

Our printing and electronic news media are investing tons of money to modernize their printing and video departments with state-of-the-art equipment. We were enthralled by NTV's live coverage on how JMB stalwart Bangla Bhai was rounded up, thanks to their smart journalists equipped with costly gears who spent sleepless days and nights to send live signals from the far-flung spot of the incident to feed us with updates. Both TV viewers and TV advertisers have nowadays been more interested in live news and views than in prerecorded dramas and dances.

May we appeal to all the printing and electronic news media to open their respective chemistry departments equipped with scientists and laboratories exclusively dedicated to detecting adulterants in foods and medicines?

May we see in a near future a live coverage undertaken by a private TV channel with one of their courageous (and unadulterated) journalists-a brilliant graduate in applied pharmacy---inspecting a drug store in a remote village, picking some medicines from a shelf, putting those under a microscope and extracting out impurities and adulterants on the spot---all under the nose of a running movie camera and being beamed live direct to TV viewers---in presence of local witnesses enthusiastically gathered around during an investigative scoop dubbed "Clean Medicine"?

Julio Godoy

When the East German nuclear power plant Rheinsberg was shut down almost 20 years ago, environmentalists expected that fauna and flora in nearby Stechlin lake would survive without further damage. The power plant in the city 75 km north of Berlin had been functioning since 1966. It took some 300,000 cubic metres of water daily from the lagoon to cool down the facility's installations. The water would then be released back into the lake -- 10 degrees warmer.

Before the plant began to function scientists had declared the waters "the cleanest in Germany," says Peter Casper, biochemist at the Institute Leibniz for Water Ecology in Stechlin.

There was no reason then to doubt their judgement. The lake is surrounded by pristine forests, without any agriculture use. The region is also scarcely populated, guaranteeing that no sewage was channelled into the lake.

Soon after the Rheinsberg nuclear power plant began operating, scientists began to find changes, Casper told IPS. "Algae and other micro-organisms started to grow very rapidly." The fauna started to degenerate.

"This is what we call the divergent development of the food chain," Casper said. "Not all living organisms in the lake reacted at the same speed to changes in the environment. Algae and other micro-organisms grow more rapidly, but also start and end their life cycle more rapidly. This means that fish, which feed on algae, and do not grow at the same new speed, are deprived of their food at a critical point in their growth."

This decoupling of the food chain is carried forward, and alters the biological relationships within the lake's flora and fauna. But, says Casper, "the biochemical structure of the lake never became oversaturated. We believe that this is because the waters were so clean from the very beginning."

When the Rheinsberg nuclear power plant ceased to function in 1988, scientists thought the lake's biodiversity would return to its original form. But it did not -- the changes in the water composition and temperature, as well as in the flora and fauna remain until today.

"Probably the lake is not going to recuperate anyway," says Casper. "The rise of temperatures due to global warming is perpetuating the changes produced by the nuclear power plant."

Analyses carried out by the Institute Leibniz have a particular meaning today due to the continuity and duration of the study. "We consider these changes we found in the lake Stechlin correspond with what is happening on a larger scale in the oceans due to global warming," Rainer Koschel, director of the Institute Leibniz told IPS. Ocean biologists have found that global warming is modifying the growth periods of algae and other sea plants. According to reports by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, 80 percent of global warming is absorbed by seawater, leading among other consequences to a rise in water temperatures.

In the North Sea, just offshore on the German and Netherlands side, biologists at the Institute Alfred Wegener for Polar and Ocean Research in Germany have established that the temperature rise, given the late winter and early spring in the northern hemisphere, has led to an earlier blossoming of algae, especially the diatoms, distorting the food chain in the region.

One-fourth of the earth's biomass is formed by diatoms, and it serves as foodstuff for hundreds of fish and other sea species. If it decays too early, the dependant fauna decimates. Another consequence of rising seawater temperatures is the decelerating blending of water masses. As it is, under normal circumstances warm water tends to float over cold water.

If, additional to this normal distribution of water, the temperature at the ocean's surface rises, the different masses of water blend less than normally with one another, leading to a further concentration of warmer water on the surface and colder water at the depths. A consequence of this is that oxygen in the colder waters shrinks, leading to the death of fauna.

Some fish and other marine organisms can only live under moderate water temperatures. Barbel, a fish common in European rivers, and brown trout, cannot survive in waters warmer than 20 degrees Celsius. Water temperatures of 22 degrees kill their eggs. In 2003 and 2006, river water temperatures in Germany were well over this limit. Casper says that trout reacts to such water temperature changes by migrating to higher regions, searching for colder waters. But by so doing, the fish invades the habitat of other species, thus disrupting the biological relations and the food chain structure in the new areas.

Biologists at the Institute Leibniz have also found that some exotic algae have developed in the Stechlin Lake. Earlier this year, Casper discovered tropical blue algae, which can only survive in these northern areas due to the high water temperatures.

"But if blue algae expands in lagoons such as the Stechlin lake, it will represent a major bacteriological problem," Casper said.

(This story is part of a series of features on sustainable development by IPS - Inter Press Service, and IFEJ -- the International Federation of Environmental Journalists.)