The New Nation - Internet Edition

Bangladesh’s economic growth

THE World Bank has projected Bangladesh's economic growth at 5.5 per cent for the current year - lower than domestic estimates due to what it says 'political tensions, severe flooding and cyclone'. Releasing its 'Global Economic Prospects (GEP) 2008' recently, the World Bank pointed out that rising inflation, potential threat to exports, increase in the food and energy prices and pressure on external balance would have an 'adverse impact on the economy'. South Asia's regional GDP, according to the GEP, was vibrant at 8.4 per cent in 2007 easing only moderately from the 8.8 per cent outturn of 2006. The regional growth is expected to pick up to 8.1 per cent by 2009 as recovering growth in the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) firms up external demand and as receding oil prices ease pressures on the import bill. In the global context, the World Bank has projected the growth to be 3.3 per cent in 2008.

The Bangladesh Bank governor has rejected the World Bank's projection of economic growth and said the economy would grow at 6 to 6.2 per cent in the current fiscal year. The governor expressed the hope that inflation which hit record high of 11.21 per cent in November on point-to-point, would come down to a range of 8 to 8.2 per cent on an average. In the first half of the fiscal year, the economy was confronted with twin floods in the August-September period and a severe cyclone Sidr in November, apart from soaring food prices often attributed to the global commodity market volatility. The central bank's half-yearly monetary policy has planned steps to help the economy overcome the shocks of the first half and see a higher growth with more employment and income generation in the second.

Heightened political tensions and severe flooding were curbing demand in the second half of 2007and will contribute to a full percentage point reduction in growth to 5.5 per cent for 2008, said the World Bank outlook. It said tighter domestic credit conditions induced a softening in investment growth, while net exports turned negative, explaining the slight moderation in growth from 6.6 per cent in 2006 to 6.5 per cent in 2007. According to media reports, sharp gains in international food prices are a growing threat in a region where food imports represent 11-20 per cent of total imports. Food imports represent 19 per cent of Bangladesh's total imports. In this context, the GEP projected that the reserves and other buffers that developing countries have built up over the years may be needed to absorb unexpected shocks. Apart from putting increased pressure on external positions, the World Bank report said higher international food prices carry potentially serious implications for the poorest members of these societies, including Bangladesh. Higher food prices could strain government coffers and generate increased inflationary pressures given widespread food subsidies. Similarly, further increases in energy prices remain a risk for the region, which is highly dependent on oil imports.

Exporting flowers and orchids

THERE are countries which are sustained economically in great measure through their flower exports. Holland, for example, is the world leader in producing huge quantities of flowers for export to the world's market. There is a big demand for flowers in some resourceful countries which do not have the facility to grow flowers on their own for climatic and related reasons. For instance, the oil rich gulf countries import a huge quantity of flowers from Holland and other European countries. Thus, internationally, growing of flowers has become a multi-billion dollar business.

Bangladesh, at present, is only a tiny stakeholder in this international market of flowers. Only in recent years, a small quantity of flowers has been exported from Bangladesh. However, this start is showing the prospect of large scale export of flowers from the country which seems to be specially suitable with its congenial climatic conditions and soil fertility for the purpose. With planned investments in this sector, there is every prospect that Bangladesh can emerge as a major exporter of horticultural products in the world's markets.

As it is, the flower growers in the country already have under their command a good domestic market. A recent newspaper report described how a poor woman at Noakhali could graduate out of poverty by raising flower plants in her tiny nursery and selling the output. Indeed, this nursery business has taken a hold in other parts of the country. Particularly in Jessore, the nursery business and the growing of flowers are particularly observed. The flowers are marketed in Dhaka and other cities where there is a sizeable and growing demand for them.

However, the potentials of the flower business can be fully tapped after regular flower exports from the country in large quantities is started. More private initiatives are required in this field. But government's promotional supports will expedite the process. Flower and orchid exporters will need to be facilitated in the same manner as vegetable and fruit exporters with increased air freighting facilities through the national airline. The capacities of Biman will have to be augmented to this end. Ground handling charges and other charges of Biman and foreign airlines will have to be scaled down to help the competitiveness of flower and orchid exporters and private flights chartered by them should become eligible for similar if not more facilities. The exporters should aim to systematically set up value-chains by training the flower growers in respect of maintaining production at desired levels and ensuring the quality of products. Regular buying of the flowers and orchids from the producers-under long-term contracts for export-will keep them interested in doing their work with high motivation.

Ensuring the very basics for our people

M Mizanur Rahman

The entire Bangladesh nation becomes dumbfounded and awestruck at the sudden spiraling prices of Atta and Rice sky-high. This nightmarish dissimulation from the mind of the Bangladeshi people has not disappeared till now. I am really very amazed to see almost all stores of rice in Dhaka were filled in pre-stock priced rice or flour before such sudden turn to the rocket high price-hike. Probably a conspiracy against the government in power has been hatched by the syndicate of the politically motivated elements among the tradesmen who are discontent with the lingering caretaker government in Bangladesh contrary to their vested interests in order to discredit the government and its fall by agitating aggrieved people's movement.

Thank God, though the people are not satisfied with the present situation yet they are not against this welfare-oriented caretaker government. Because they have been virtually dissatisfied with the past political governments who were heavily corrupted and bloodsuckers of the people and for that they do not like the return of those culprits in the seat of government to rule them. Though there is a lot of hue and cry for the election and return of democracy but people seem to have been suspicious of those nefarious elements that are trumpeting their drums of politics indirectly or directly. Such situation has already been created in cultural and educational fields fomenting troubles among the simple and credulous student communities and so-called intellectuals. The common people fear always of its proactive reprisals.

The present government rose to the occasion out of a great chaos and indisciplined political arena. There are trials and errors. One cannot escape from these social, economic and political working disciplines. What a very few Advisers of this caretaker government dare to take such huge responsibilities in the challenging circumstances with courage and fortitude is unparalleled in the history of this country. Thanks to Bangladesh national joint armed forces who have been strongly abutting this government with a true spirit of nationalism. Its calculated discipline made the government disciplined to some extent and there are many more steps to bring good results forward.

I must mention here that one of the most splendid jobs that the joint forces under this government have undertaken is national Identity card system for fair election where vote-riggings would now be impossible.

What Bangladesh needs is moral education in its social, economic and political arena in the truest sense of national character. The whole nation will be built on it. Such revolution in the educational field in Bangladesh seems to have been urgent. Its technological aspect is spreading like wildfire as the need of the hour. General education is often seen mired by tampering with question papers in no less than a place called National University! How long should this nation bear the scar of this shame?

Again, I am to turn to the high prices of daily necessities that go beyond the reach of the common people, which need to be handled very strictly with necessary punitive measures against the nefarious perpetrators. Otherwise the vitality of this nation will be dwindled to an unexpected turn. We are happy that this government is trying its best to hold its control.

The common people should be supplied rice and flour and other staple food items at subsidised rate by ration system, so that middle-income groups are not deprived of its legitimate claims. Like soldiers and police, supplies of at least food grains at subsidised rate to the lower income group in rural and urban areas will enhance the image of this welfare-oriented government.

Low-cost housing projects with proper sanitation and supply of water for the lower income group people including government employees throughout Bangladesh will usher in a great era for this nation. This needs concerted efforts of the people and the government. In this regard, government should take appropriate initiatives and measures as early as possible.

Since liberation of Bangladesh the people were expecting a good and welfare-oriented government in the spirit of liberation war but people's hopes and aspirations had never been fulfilled to its expectation. Especially the poor people remained poor as usual while some lower middleclass families of both rural and urban areas could not rise to the occasion and became poorer. Some micro-credit supplier NGO's boast of their sky-high achievements in theory and propaganda that is yet to be monitored and the true picture of poverty alleviation should require to be brought to light with facts and figures.

Most of the common people of Bangladesh have been cheated in many ways. They have been allured with the prospective jobs abroad by some notorious Adam-Beparies in collaboration with their foreign agents. Ultimately, they cheated the illiterate rural folks taking away their last resort, that is money and materials making them completely destitute.

So there are harrowing tales of such human sufferings and disappointments loom large in our country. The sense of patriotism seldom has its place there. There are people who decry with the sigh of disappointment as saying, should we have spilled our valuable blood and laid down most of our precious lives in the war of liberation for these cheats!

Now those who are in the caretaker government, for the brief period, responsible to pave the way for election of people's representatives, have to apply their sagacity their that the next elected government must be honest and patriotic who must have tenacity to sacrifice self-interest for the poor teeming millions of people in Bangladesh to make this state a truly welfare-oriented People's Republic, self-content with its immense resources to be applied without an iota of wastage.

Culture and diplomacy

Simon Jenkins

THE Russians understand. They know where power lies in modern diplomacy. It is not with British Foreign Office striped suits, rolled umbrellas and rolled minds, with nuanced telegrams and choreographed demarches.

Real diplomacy has moved out of embassy to the sandals-and-corduroy department, to the camomile-sipping, clog-dancing herbivores of the British Council. Mother Russia could not care less about a smooth chancery diplomat, but her soul is apparently tormented by student visas, poetry reading and Acker Bilk. These, said the Russian Federal Security Service on January 16, were "agents of provocation by a foreign power".

Culture and lifestyle are the diplomacy of the 21st century. Old-fashioned ambassadorship was long ago demoted by the telephone, the jet and the email to the Atlantis of 'Diplomatia', where officials cling to such ancient rituals as residences abroad, formal dinners and military attaches. No businessman worth his salt uses the commercial attache network. Most political telegrams, as Sir Nicholas Henderson noted, are unread and languish in the archive. Most hospitality is an emotional support for bored resident staff.

If governments wish to talk to each other, they lift the phone. Such diplomacy may need someone on the spot to keep a phonebook and offer the occasional hotel room, but a nice house, a man and a boy can supply those. The Foreign Office's institutional role in foreign policy - like that of the American state department - has long been overrated. Its demise was never clearer than in Blair's appointment of Margaret Beckett as his foreign secretary.

Britain's relations with India or Japan or Mexico, let alone with smaller states, are not dependent on these monastic outposts of bureaucracy. Today's true diplomats are comers and goers, tourists, foreign correspondents, exchange students, visiting artists and celebrities. They are footballers and football hooligans. They are backpackers and gap-year teenagers. They are fair-trade inspectors, merchant bankers and call-centre outsourcers. They are nominees for Oscars and Emmies, the Rolling Stones and Led Zeppelin. From The Satanic Verses and Hogwarts to soppy sentimental movies, non-political Britain is both diplomacy's image and its influence.

These new diplomats carry less historical baggage than their predecessors. In India recently I was told time and again that the British high commission was associated with the Raj while the British Council was associated with Shakespeare and London University. Indians preferred the latter. The same diplomatic importance attaches to those who welcome foreigners to British soil as hoteliers, academics and immigration officials. The London correspondents of American (or any other) newspapers have more influence over Britain's image than any diplomat, and merit appropriate care and attention. Yet the Foreign Office has cut the grant to London's Foreign Press Association.

The British Council has, since 1935, been the chief agent of cultural diplomacy. This followed the discovery (in the 1929 D'Abernon report) that the reason why some foreign politicians and businessmen declared themselves pro-British was that they had been taught in Britain. It was the equivalent of pro-British armies being those whose officers had been trained at Sandhurst. Such 'alternative diplomacy' mattered.

Yet 20 years ago the British Council was protesting that its budget was half that of the German and US equivalents, and a quarter that of the French. This remains roughly the case today. The council must earn what it can from teaching English - an increasingly competitive business - and selling university courses; but one of its core activities, the supply of local libraries, is pathetically underfinanced. Libraries are still the easiest way of reaching and creating young Anglophiles. In this the council has always been not just the poor relation of the Foreign Office, but less appreciated even than the BBC World Service.

The Russian assault this week on the council's offices in St Petersburg and Yekaterinburg was, we are told, another round in the game of chicken that dominates relations between Russia and the West - to which the Litvinenko murder was a mere sideshow. Bush/Blair's contemptuous treatment of Vladimir Putin over Nato and the EU was bound to evoke a chauvinist response, and has done so. If anyone wants an example of the bankruptcy of conventional diplomacy (on both sides), it is here.

Yet such diplomacy is regularly upstaged by cultural confrontation. Moscow's attempt to foil the Russian treasures exhibition, opening next week at London's Royal Academy, was hamfisted. The excuse was that pictures from the Pushkin Museum had been (briefly) impounded two years ago in Switzerland by lawyers claiming ownership dating back to the second world war. Since the pictures were already on show in Germany, this was absurd. Nonetheless, Britain's culture department moved with speed, passing an indemnity law in 48 hours. This demonstrated both the potency of such diplomacy and how fast governments can pass laws when they choose. Never let a minister say there is 'no time' for new legislation.

The Russian attack on the British Council suggests that such semi-detached agencies are moving ever closer to centre stage. The council prides itself on not being a government department and thus being able to operate independently of the executive. This does not wash. The council office in St Petersburg may not have been targeted because its head is son of the council's chairman, Lord Kinnock. But Kinnock's appointment by Blair was a blatant political perk. As long as the council is financed by the government it will be regarded as doing the government's bidding.

It is a fantasy to imagine that cultural diplomacy, in the widest sense, can be divorced from international relations. It is and should be treated as part and parcel of the same enterprise. The budgetary ratio of conventional to cultural diplomacy (including the World Service) of roughly four to one should be drastically narrowed. That ambassadorship in Britain should remain a foreign service closed shop is also nowadays wrong. Other nations benefit from sending academics, writers and businessmen to represent them abroad. Britain should have the imagination to send a scholar to India or a general to Pakistan or a banker to Japan.

The British Council ought to be the lead diplomatic department in all but the most politically sensitive countries, and be staffed appropriately. Politics, defence and commerce should be subsidiary activities. In an age of soft power, Western democracies will do far better in propagating their values of freedom of speech and expression by the exchange of people and ideas than by the bullying diplomatic rhetoric of the war on terror. They should lead by example. That requires the diplomacy of human and cultural exchange.

The Russian closure of British Council offices is in every sense a step backwards. It will hurt young Russians aspiring to see and know more about the West. It will, in the longer term, hurt British interests in Russia and thus remit to the dark ages relations between two countries which should, in the light of history, be the best of friends.

(Simon Jenkins is a Guardian columnist)

Opinion: When university teachers act in party line

Professor M Zahidul Haque

In protest against unjust and whimsical activities of some executive members, four teachers holding executive committee posts including Vice President of Sher-e-Bangla Agricultural University Teachers' Association (SAUTA) have resigned on Monday (21/01/2008)

The dispute erupted when some highly ambitious, self-seeking members of SAU Teachers' Association tried to stage a human-chain without such programme being passed in the general meeting. It may be mentioned here that the SAUTA in a recent general meeting took a resolution to issue an ultimatum to the Vice Chancellor of Sher-e-Bangla Agricultural University (SAU), Prof. Dr. A M Farooque fixing him a time upto January 17 for taking necessary measures towards disclosing and implementing the findings of the Inquiry Committee formed earlier to investigate into the alleged irregularities by some teachers/officers of SAU in the admission of 2004. On Thursday afternoon the VC had a meeting with the executive body of SAUTA wherein he informed them that as per the advice of the University Legal Adviser he called a meeting of the Syndicate on 31st January to submit the inquiry report for further action. The President and GS of SAUTA had reportedly agreed inspite of their request to call the Syndicate meeting on January 26. However, the VC told them he would prefer January 31st as there will be Biswa Ijtima from January 25. But some motivated teachers undermining the general teachers' sentiments compelled some of their colleagues to participate in their human chain formation programme. But as the turn out was too poor, only 35 teachers out of nearly 140, the human chain staging could not be materialised successfully.

Meanwhile, the general teachers organised a meeting yesterday which was presided over by Prof. Md. Shamsul Hoque. The meeting expressed grave concern about the impetuosity of some teachers and condemn the unjust activities. The meeting urged upon the authority to take stern action against those who are out to create anarchy and instability on the campus. They also called upon the authority to award exemplary punishment as per law to the person(s) responsible for creating anarchy and in interrupting congenial academic atmosphere.

Later the teachers present in the meeting met the waiting journalists and brief them about the situation and answer to their questions. A 'Press Release' signed by nearly 70 teachers were distributed among the reporters. The teachers at one stage of their press briefing requested the Cretaker Government to appoint next VC from among the eligible senior Professors of SAU, of course after the present VC completes his term.

The whole chain of events only testifies that the teachers in most public funded Universities prefer to act in a certain political party line ignoring their very basic duties and responsibilities of teaching the students. The most unfortunate part of the politico-game is that there is no sign of an end to it even in the distant future.

(Professor M Zahidul Haque, Chairman, Department of Agricultural Extension & Information System, Sher-e-Bangla Agricultural University, Dhaka)