The New Nation - Internet Edition

Unwelcome student violence

FOLLOWING the tragic death of Ashiqur Rahman, a second year student of Dhaka Polytechnic Institute, in a road accident, the 'Sat Rasta' crossing near the institute virtually turned into a batte ground. The students clashed with riot police for the second consecutive day on Saturday. They took to the street, damaged several vehicles and blocked the Tejgaon diversion road bringing traffic to a standstill for hours. About a hundred people were injured. The institute has been closed for an indefinite period.

It is natural for the students to have deep feeling for Rahman. But the way they chose to express the same is completely unacceptable. The students could place their demands before the appropriate authority by confining their movements within the campus. They instead chose to cause inconveniences for the members of the public. It is not acceptable that the students will damage valuable properties and cause sufferings to the people. The members of the public are in no way responsible for the accident.

The 'Sat Rasta' crossing is a strategic point connecting very important highway to and from the capital city. Any further attempt to disrupt normal life on any ground should be nipped in the bud. The students must be brought under strict academic discipline.

Not in a distant past members of two rival groups of students of the same institute were locked in bloody clashes. Concerned authorities must find out the underlying reasons behind. The students must also understand that such violence does not pay ultimately. They themselves are to suffer in the end.

Earnings from tourism

THE foreign currency earnings from tourism and related services has largely been outstripped by money spent by Bangladeshi travellers abroad as revealed by a recent media report. Impressive growth in foreign tourist visits even could not hold back the real drain on foreign exchange earnings, official statistics suggest. The number of outbound Bangladeshi travellers has doubled in seven years and they spend more generously abroad than foreign tourists coming to our country. Foreign tourist arrival is growing, but at a slower pace than Bangladeshis going abroad. A study shows, about 1.13 lakh Bangladeshi travellers went abroad in 2000 and their number more than doubled to 2.33 lakh in 2007.

The outbound tourists spent Tk 1,072 crore in foreign exchange abroad in 2007 for tourism purposes. On the other hand, the country's earnings from tourism and related services was about Tk 526 crore in foreign currency. It is rather difficult to have accurate and authentic information on tourism once the national tourism authority comes into being. In fact, the overall growth in the tourism sector was impressive in 2007 despite political uncertainty and major natural disasters like floods and cyclone.

Domestic tourism also grew significantly with an increasing number of people travelling to different natural and archaeological sites, private tour operators say. Cox's Bazar, Teknaf, St. Martin's Island, Kuakata beach, the mangrove forest Sundarbans, archaeological sites and places and places of pilgrimage attracted most of travellers from both home and abroad. According to the global tourism body's index, Bangladesh ranks 120 out of 124 member countries. Efforts must

be there at all levels - private and public - to boost tourism as the World Tourism Organisation predicts that global tourism industry will benefit from more than one billion tourists by 2010 and 1.6 billion by 2020. This will give tourism the status of the number one industry globally.

Food crisis needs green upheaval

Mohammad Shahidul Islam

Climate change is setting to trigger cyclones, droughts, heavy rains and floods in unpredicted places at unpredicted times round the world. Recently Myanmar has been the victim of climate change. This in turn keeps affecting food production. Consequently there is prevailing food shortage for the poor, the down-trodden, those who are affected by wars of life and livelihood. So what is the way out to face climate change?

We, as a global neighborhood, should continue to exist, share the new techniques to grow more food. Immediately what all the nations of the world should do is to counterfeit economic links on a regional basis, assess the demand and supply of essential food products in those regions and start moving towards producing more and more essential foods by encouraging youngsters to get interested in agriculture and food production.

There is an overwhelming imbalance between the specialization of technology based education and the agro-industry based education. What the love of the land brings for food production has been erased off with the large scale, extensive, mechanized farming methods. Together with this, small scale farming and the bond between the land and man should be counterfeited for the better performance in food production.

The food that is produced in countries that have food shortages should be distributed within the country before the production is exported elsewhere. There are instances and experiences of farmers going without enough rice and fishermen going without enough fish for their families because these are exported for the consumption of unknown people in unknown countries.

It is a heartbreaking blunder that we failed to conserve our own important crops. Rice, estimated by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization as the world's second most consumed food, is our staple diet. But potatoes and many other imported food items are also in demand now. The colonized local cuisine has been making things really difficult for the masses.

Rice is the staple food of Bangladesh and many Asian countries. Today a kilo of rice is priced at BDT 35 to 50/- why can't our peasants get a huge income as a big demand is there for rice in Bangladesh? So, immediate measures should be taken to give the pride of place to agriculture which helped Bangladesh become the granary of South Asia like the golden era when Sayasta Khan ruled over this beautiful country.

Though foreign employment, garments and telecommunication have become major sectors that contribute enormously for the economy of Bangladesh, the fact that agriculture was the back bone of our economy should not be forgotten or ignored.

There are many reasons why agriculture should get back its due place in Bangladesh. First and foremost, Bangladesh is ideally suitable for cultivation in terms of geography.

The country has got many places where different climatic conditions help crops such as paddy to grow luxuriantly. Secondly we Bangladeshis have got the habit of consuming rice for many centuries. "A hungry man is an angry man" this axiom clearly points out that it is futile to talk about anything when a person is hungry. Development and prosperity are compelled to be kept on the back burner when a nation faces a crisis.

The whole world in general and the Asia in particular are inching towards beckoning the famine. Therefore it is high time meaningful steps were taken to make this country self sufficient in the field of food which is one of the basic needs of the human beings.

The program like "Let us grow crops to develop Bangladesh" should be implemented right away and should get the full support of every one. Competitions in the field of cultivation at village, thana and district level could be organized to encourage more participation of the general public. This will indeed help increase the food production in the country.

It is pertinent to know the real causes of this food crisis which has affected not only Bangladesh but also many nations in the world. Some of them are beyond our control while others can be controlled if all of us work collectively.

One of the biggest barriers that makes a massive contribution for this crisis is fuel. The Price of petroleum keeps on escalating.

No country can confront this menace which holds back the development of the world. Hence only things that can be done by us are cutting wastage and using cheaper types of energy.

Indian mix of cinema and cricket

Barkha Dutt

In between lapping up the sixers and drooling over Shah Rukh Khan stomping about in the stands, what do you feel when you see the bevy of barely clad, big-breasted blondes wiggling their bottoms at a billion people? As they swirl and twirl their little red skirts and flash their wide, gummy smiles - draping their white skin around some two-bit toy boy from Bombay - do they 'cheer' you up or make you mildly sick?

One of these evenings, as our imported cheer-givers rose in a collective whoop of manufactured joy, my 85-year-old uncle - otherwise staunchly liberal - frowned in faint disapproval. "What are these cheerleaders," he asked scornfully, "do they think we live in an Archie comic?"

I thought that was a pretty astute reading of why some of us (I, for one) may find the spectacle of choreographed sexuality crass and, frankly, trashy. Somehow it evokes images of fat men and giggly girls in the baseball fields of middle America.

It makes you wonder: when you have already got the uniquely Indian mix of cinema and cricket, why on earth would you need to infuse this heady cocktail with some strange, foreign ingredient? Before you call me xenophobic, hang on a minute. This isn't a moral plea for the so-called preservation of 'Indian culture'. We all know how much hypocrisy underlines that awful and overused phrase. But yes, there is something about cricket's new calendar girls that makes me wonder why a self-confident nation needs to play copycat to some air-headed ritual from the American heartland.

But even if I think that the cheerleaders are (there's no polite way to say this) essentially trashy, I find the attempt by sundry politicians to ban them - or dress them up in clothes that cover their knees - farcical and indefensible.

Not for the first time, the furious debate over IPL's cheerleaders is a conundrum for all liberal thinkers. We do not want to endorse the Indian politician's propensity to ban anything that invokes public debate. In principle, we won't allow the government to mediate our morality.

We know it's ludicrous that 'vulgarity' was first debated in a city whose major industry is defined by young women who pout, strip, thrust and twist for hungry, lingering cameras, as their over-ambitious mothers befriend lecherous film producers.

Bipasha Basu's 'Billo Rani' is more aggressively sexual than the faceless bimbettes from America; Kareena Kapoor's sultry, swinging walk in the recent promos of Tashan has her wearing as short a skirt as the women with the wiggling bottoms; and 'item number' has now become an acceptable, even necessary, pass grade for any woman who wants to be measured on the oomph scale in Bollywood. Who we are to moan and groan about so-called vulgarity?

Have we looked at ourselves recently? So, other than the fact that the cheerleaders are to Indian item girls what Kentucky Fried Chicken may be to Haldirams (we like our own masala better than some American, fast-food chain), we can hardly protest the pom-pom girls on grounds of 'obscenity'. If we find their boogie-woogies offensive, by definition, we have to be as appalled by our homespun sexual athletes and their strutting performances.

We can't be a country that holds up Rakhi Sawant as an icon of womanhood (she has endorsements of approval from no less than Shobhaa De and Karan Johar) for fearlessly parading her sexuality as a means of social mobility, and then whine about some inconsequential troupe of babes called the Washington Redskins. If steamy, sexy, sultry have become perfectly acceptable adjectives, even compliments in modern Indian syntax, how can we get so worked up over a bunch of girls in short red skirts?

Indian sexuality - in films, advertisements, magazines, public discourse - is today as unapologetically raunchy as anywhere else in the world. And maybe that's what's at the heart of the cheerleaders debate - and it's a point that we have all entirely missed. Is manufactured sexuality really a mark of liberation for women? Or have we just internalised all the worst clichés of post- feminist clap-trap in the name of emancipation?

In our attempt to break Indian women free from the conventional orthodoxy of right-wing moralists, have we just replaced one kind of stereotype with another? And with one that is as oppressive and unforgiving?

While our sense of selves cannot be defined by a culture that seeks to imprison female sexuality, must our sense of modernity be borrowed from a country that still debates whether women should have the right to abortion?

In her book, Female Chauvinist Pigs, American writer Ariel Levy first chronicled what she described as "women and the rise of raunch culture". Here's what her book describes as an average evening of American television. "I would turn on the television and find strippers in G-strings explaining how best to lap-dance a man to orgasm; I would flip the channel and see babes in tight tiny uniforms bouncing up and down on trampolines.

Britney Spears was becoming increasingly popular and increasingly unclothed, and her undulating body became so familiar to me, I felt like we used to go out".

Is Rakhi Sawant not India's version of Britney Spears? Could this soon be how an evening of Indian television will look like? And will we then say: you've come a long way, baby.

Or will we just have turned full circle - to end up exactly where we started?

Pressure to move

John Defterios

The US Federal Reserve moved for the seventh time in the past six months taking interest rates down to two per cent in the United States this week. The central bank, as is customary, put out a statement with the action underlining that financial markets remain under "considerable stress", credit conditions "tight" and the housing market contraction still underway.

Ben Bernanke and his team at the Fed hope this will be the last of the cuts and that the worst of the credit crisis has past - don't be too certain about that. This is what concerns central bank counterparts in the Middle East, especially those in the Gulf states.

Watching with anxiety what is transpiring in the US economy and to a lesser extent what has crossed the Atlantic to Britain, Gulf Cooperation countries, minus Kuwait, have to follow suit due to their dollar pegs. They did and they too hope the storm front has passed - again don't be too certain about that as well.

The problem, as we have talked about in this column, is quite different in the Gulf and it became more difficult this week in the region's largest economy, Saudi Arabia. Inflation in the Kingdom hit a near 30-year high of 9.6 per cent. The cost of rents, fuel and water surged 15.8 per cent in March; other day-to-day staples saw double digit gains as well. Rents went up nearly 17 per cent at the start of the year.

The United Arab Emirates, which is traditionally slow in releasing these figures, officially is seeing an inflation rate of 9.3 per cent, but that goes back a half year. Other fast-growing, energy rich states are facing similar challenges.

The real issue is what to do about it. Finding an answer is not easy. For one, interest rates should be going up, not down. Number two, wages cannot keep pace with inflation, but leaders like Hosni Mubarak of Egypt know when the heat is on.

He took what was an already high pay increase for civil servants of 15 per cent and doubled it.

The region's most populous country is running a near double digit budget deficit, so the actions won't be welcomed by foreign investors nor the finance ministry for that matter. And to round out the list, money supply will continue to surge as Opec export related earnings this year surge past the $1 trillion mark.

The real challenge with inflation, as central bankers and economists know, is that when it accelerates it is very difficult to slow it down. For purposes of an easy analogy, this is not a nimble racing boat, but a high speed Titanic. The real danger at hand is the threat inflation poses for the economic development cycle now underway in the Middle East. On our programme we often talk about an Arab Renaissance, that growth this year, despite the downturn in the G8 countries should still be above 6 per cent. That is true, but it won't mean much if that growth is eaten away by skyrocketing prices.

The other issue is keeping workers in all those "castles in the sand" being constructed. The number is staggering; $3 trillion is either at work already or on the drawing boards.

It will be very difficult to sustain those mega-projects if one cannot attract builders and very importantly labourers to get through the summer heat so they can send monies home to India, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka or Vietnam.

For Dubai and its second wave of development this, of course, will need to be addressed. But I am thinking more about Saudi Arabia in which one of the seven economic cities currently gathering momentum. The other six hold the key to the Kingdom's future for the next generation to come.

The region, minus the North African states, is overly dependent on imports, especially food. Gulf countries are paying for those imports with a weak dollar, which is down 35 per cent against the euro in three years. The European Union is the number one market for those goods. This is where the loyalty to the dollar gets very pricey.

Leaders from the United Nations and the World Bank held an emergency meeting in Switzerland this week and set up a food crisis task force aimed at helping the poorest countries deal with escalating prices.

It is hard to argue that countries seeing record oil revenues are suffering as badly as those say in Sub-Sahara Africa - that is certainly not the case - but rising prices are a real problem and will continue to be so.

John Defterios presents Marketplace Middle East on CNN

A lost revolution

Eric S. Margolis

At the end of his first year in office, France's hyperkinetic president, Nicholas Sarkozy, finds himself in deep trouble with voters and opinion-makers.

Sarkozy's approval rating has dropped below 30 per cent, rivalling the abysmal standing of his new ally, US President George Bush. No French president in modern history has dropped so fast or so far in approval ratings.

French food prices are up a staggering 20-30 per cent. Inflation is 3.2 per cent. The deficit has risen sharply and the treasury is bare. Sarkozy's despatch of 1,000 more French troops to Afghanistan, his close ties to George Bush, and his decision to reintegrate France into Nato have proven highly unpopular here. Many French still see themselves as equals to the US, not its junior partner. There is also growing unhappiness with Sarkozy's dramatic change in France's traditional friendly relations with and support for the Muslim world. Sarkozy and his fellow French 'neocons' have close emotional links to Israel's rightwing parties and have threatened war against Iran. They also appear to have largely adopted Israel's view of the ongoing Palestinian crisis.

A big uproar awaits when the Defence Ministry reveals much of France's military equipment is outdated and must be replaced at a time when more French troops are headed to Asia, the Gulf, and Africa. No one has yet dared break this bad news to Sarkozy, who has demanded further spending cuts from his cash-strapped government.

But what has annoyed French the most about their new president is his aggressive personality, frequent lack of finesse, and tendency to show off. 'We wanted a president, and got a playboy, instead' complains one newspaper.

French keep their favourite restaurants and love lives secret. But Sarkozy splashed his embarrassing divorce from his former wife all over the media. His attempts to groom her as a second Jacky Kennedy backfired badly when she dumped him for another man. The French media now calls Barak Obama 'the black Kennedy,' while it complains of 'Sarkoverdosing.'

Sarkozy's very public whirlwind romance with the beautiful model/songwriter Carla Bruni dismayed many French as much as it fascinated them. French like their presidents regal, detached, and above gossip, like the great Charles DeGaulle.

'We are living in a cheap romance novel,' growls the press after Sarkozy's marital shenanigans, his Hollywood exhibitionism, and foreign luxury vacations. First Lady Carla wowed Londerners on a recent visit, but the snobby Brits made savage fun of the short French president and his painful eagerness to be accepted among the high and mighty.

The multi-lingual Carla Bruni is an important asset to Sarkozy, who does not speak English and requires social polish. Friends of hers tell me she is extremely intelligent, refined and level-headed - just what Sarkozy needs.

Last week, he went on national TV to answer soft questions from fawning journalists and to apologise to France for his public behaviour and failure to implement promised reforms. Few French were impressed by their 'American president's' contrition.

It's a pity the 52-year old Sarko's love life has gotten in the way of reforms France desperately needs. Sarkozy and his able PM, François Fillon, are challenging belligerent unions and trying to modernise France and make it more globally competitive.

France can no longer afford lush pensions and short working hours and still meet EU budget rules and Asian competitors. Too many people still work for the government, which gobbles up 55 per cent of GDP.

Sarkozy has rightly made modernising France, cutting taxes, and uprooting Socialist-inspired anti-business regulations his priorities. Unions and special interest groups are now gearing up for a major fight, threatening strikes to again paralyse France and make everyone miserable.

Sarkozy's goals are admirable but his methods often are not. His worst idea to date: a daft proposal to increase competition in the mass food trade by lifting restrictions on the size of supermarkets. This would allow France's retail giants to crush the remaining small food merchants who guard the justly-renowned quality of French food and help make this nation so very agreeable.

Promoting giant supermarkets in France where fresh, high quality food is held sacred, could prove a disaster for Sarkozy and make his next four years in office particularly difficult. Every time French eat rubber chicken, previously-frozen bread or plastic cheese they will blame 'Sarko.'

All in all, not a good start to year I of the Sarkozy Revolution.

Eric S. Margolis is a veteran American journalist and contributing foreign editor of The Toronto Sun