The New Nation - Internet Edition

Intrigue against RMG industry

A LARGELY circulated vernacular daily on Friday reported that some local and foreign motivated circles are engaged to keep Bangladesh's garment sector restive. The motive of the local circle is reportedly to achieve political gains by creating topsy turvy in the garment industrial zone. And the motive of the foreign circle is to destroy Bangladeshi garments' market abroad. These two circles work hand in hand and they apply various techniques to disturb garment production.

The local circle operates under the guise of labour union. The leaders are neither industrial workers nor they have any logical connection with the industry. They are self- styled labour leaders and are no genuine well-wishers of the labourers or the industry. The interested foreign circle always gives them covert support, sometimes on many pretexts. Non-Governmental organisations (NGOs) play a strong role here. They reportedly liaise with the foreign circle and local labour unionists.

These forces mislead the labourers by spreading rumours and distorted information. Thus they try to keep the sector restless and deprive the country of its number one source of foreign exchange earning. Since one intelligence agency is reportedly aware of all these intrigues, the government and relevant authorities responsible for the garment sector must also be aware of those. The matter deserves highest attention of the government and all of its agencies. As the matter is many faceted it cannot be solved in one stroke overnight. It needs to be handled with patience and correct measures.

Saving the Buriganga

THE river Buriganga once formed a very important part of the environment of Dhaka city. It was a clean flowing river that added an aesthetic appeal to the residents of the city. The famous nawabs of Dhaka had built their magnificent living quarters on its banks. One of them, the Ahsan Manjil, still stands and now serves as a museum to remind people of the glorious days of the city's past. But the Buriganga at present is in a threatened state of existence. The river has been progressively dying from pollution factors and encroachments.

All kinds of excreta and filth are now thrown in huge quantities into it regularly. Its waters are unusable. Thus, the river must be saved from pollution through the adoption and implementation of abatement measures. At the heart of such measures should be stoppage of discharge of all kinds of effluents into the river without proper treatment. The natural flow of the river has been impeded by construction of all kinds of unauthorised structures on its bed. The encroachments have caused narrowing of the river and its canal like appearances at many places.

The caretaker government has had some success in driving away the encroachers. While this move needs to be welcomed wholeheartedly, only eviction will not serve any purpose if it is not followed up by concrete plans to prevent reoccupation by the encroachers. Probably a well paved circular road all the way along the banks, plus planting of trees and creation of riverside parks can be attempted by the government to consolidate the encroachment-free conditions. More significant would be completing legal arrangements and the setting up of all sorts of checks and physical barriers so that the encroachers find no opportunity for again occupying these places.

Encouraging the farmers to grow more food

Mohammad Shahidul Islam

IN THE past three or four decades, rice farmers have been driven into more and more difficulties. The chances are that the production of rice will cease within the next thirty or forty years and the people would have to depend entirely on the imports from other countries. The authorities, it must be stated, have been quite blind to what has happened. Many forces have been quite active in making the rice farmer a helpless person. Imported fertilisers and pesticides are very expensive. Many farmers find that the total cost of production exceeds the income they get from the produce. There is already a noticeable reduction in the extent of paddy lands in many parts of the country. In the last two decades of the British rule and in the first two decades after gaining independence, rural farmers in this part of the world enjoyed a fair degree of support from the authorities. There were government farms almost in every district, which provided guidance to paddy farmers. Farmers purchased seeds and other inputs from the government farms. The traditional farming ensured the degree of success for cultivation.

The most important farming practice was the holding of 'borgha' to carry out cultivation. The main activities would consist of ploughing, sowing, transplanting, weeding, harvesting and threshing. Land owners invited everyone in the village to participate in 'borgha' and also also organised a grand lunch for farmers. The extent of paddy land owned by different persons varied. Some owned bigger tracts of land and others owned smaller tracts. But the farming activity was carried on from one end to the other until the entire tract was covered. Some farmers did not own buffaloes but that did not affect the preparation of their fields. All fields were ploughed using a pool of buffaloes and bulls. The only expense involved was the cost of the grand lunch prepared for the occasion. Weeding was a special occasion when the ladies of the village participated. Threshing was done by night by harnessing the buffaloes and the operations were managed by the healthy bodied elders of the village and active young men.

Thailand is a country that produces the largest quantity of rice and exports a large part of it. Thailand produces tractors too. But they don't keep small farmers at the mercy of the market forces and tractor owners. They are doing everything possible to keep traditional practices relating to paddy cultivation alive and safe. At the beginning of the cultivation season the first ploughing at the auspicious time is carried out by the king. The farmers in the entire country start their ploughing following the start given by the king. With the patronage, guidance and enthusiasm of the king they started a buffalo bank in 1979 to ensure the supply of buffaloes to the small farmers. This is not a business venture. It is a national programme to assist the small farmers at no extra cost to them. The buffaloes are given to the farmers for use and while the buffalo is with the farmer and if it is a female and delivers a male calf it is gifted to the farmer. But if the calf is a female it has to be given to the bank pool. Persons who cultivate large extents of paddy land plough with the tractor. But the small farmer is safe with the buffalo. These noble ideas can easily be introduced in Bangladesh.

For humans life span has increased because of development of science and the advancement of medical science. But the recent food scarcity and increases in price has dealt a blow to millions of people who are poverty-stricken. The scarcity of food products that gave way to price increases has affected a majority of people in every country in the world. There is news that in several countries there are food riots taking place due to the scarcity of food and exorbitant food prices. In Morocco 34 persons were imprisoned for engaging in food riots. In Yemen 12 persons got killed during food riots. Food riots took place in Indonesia as well as in Italy.

The increase in population of the world has been a major concern. Because of that more and more arable land is becoming inhabitable lands. When forests are destroyed to build houses and dwelling places the wild animal that lose their dwelling habitats enter into cultivated lands and start to destroy and damage food crops.

Climatic change has now taken a worst turn. Untimely and unseasonable rainfall and resultant floods and dry seasons that follow are causing destruction of cultivated food. The increase in price of fuel due to the increase in the price of crude oil has increased the cost of cultivation as well as the cost of transport of food products.

The cost of animal feed has gone up and the expense incurred in the production of one unit meat is much more than that of the price of the unit of meat and it is a diseconomy.

The fall of the value of the American dollar and its fluctuation in value has an adverse affect on the world economy. The more the value of the American dollar falls the more is the increase in price of goods in the other countries of the world.

International organisations and countries of the world are taking interest and steps regarding the crisis situation worldwide. Conferences and discussions are held and short-term and immediate as well as long-term and durable actions are being implemented to redeem the world from the dangerous situation.

The use of grains and edible seeds for the production of gases and fuels should be permanently stopped. While millions of people are suffering without food to eat and the use of their food to produce fuel is a grave mistake. It should be stopped altogether. The OPEC countries should be pressurised to reduce the prices of crude oil. The use of windmills, sea wave power and solar energy to produce electricity should be encouraged.

The reliance on certain food stuffs for nutrition should be changed. The examples for these are wheat flour and rice. More than three billion people depend on these as their staple food. More and more yams, sea foods and vegetables should be consumed as an alternative to the staple food.

Improvement of agricultural activities and production is another necessity to overcome food scarcity. Farmers should be encouraged to adopt improved varieties of food crops that can withstand the climatic and seasonal changes and are resistant to plant diseases. Providing agricultural inputs at subsidised prices and purchasing and storing agricultural yields at guaranteed fair prices will encourage and give hope to farmers to engage in more agricultural production activities. It is a fact that in some parts of India farmers who sustained losses due to destruction of crops by a diverse whether conditions even committed suicide. Some farmers have given up agriculture and sought employment in other sectors even at lesser wages just to survive.

Helping farmers to safeguard their crops from being destroyed by wild animals is very important for the increase of food production. Utilising uncultivated land also is very important. It is said that China is going to take on lease lands in other countries to cultivate food. Brazil has decided and started destroying its rainforests to convert them into agricultural lands. Some agricultural products are converted into animal feed to increase the meat production.

This should be discouraged or banned in some countries. This could be done by legal controls and increases taxation on such industries. When meat is consumed the bones skins and blood of the animals that were farmed from the food they have eaten to live and all that goes to waste as refuse. The home garden cultivation should be encouraged.

By stabilising the value of dollar, improving food storage facilities, elimination of or reduction of the wastage of grains while handling and transporting and control of consumption could bring about a solution for the present food crisis the world is facing.

Think local, act local

Simon Jenkins

GAZING briefly at the Eurovision song contest this week I could not rid my mind of a quite different image, that of Nato's multilateral force headquarters in Kabul. There was the same flag-waving and confusion of purpose, the same small-state rivalry and cynical balancing of interests. There was the same belief that, simply by being international, a so-called community of nations was forged.

For Eurovision and Nato, read the Olympics and Burma, read the Moscow cup final and Darfur. Read the European parliament, Fifa, the World Bank, the Organisation of African Unity, the European parliament. I was brought up to regard "international" as synonymous with saintly. It was a concept to supplant the rude nationalism of the 20th century in a worldwide concord of peace, ruled by a clerisy of selfless bureaucrats; Dag Hammersköld out of Albert Schweitzer.

Today the word "international" suggests tailored suits, tax-free salaries, white Land Cruisers and Geneva. The Eurovision contest is run by the European Broadcasting Union with 400 staff in Switzerland, with no risk of oversight or reform. It takes after the International Olympics Committee, which now charges its host taxpayers $20-30 billion for two weeks of extravaganza in the name of bogus world brotherhood. Fifa, the international football regulator/promoter, forces thousands of English fans to travel to Moscow to watch their teams act out an insult to the great game - a penalty shoot-out stunt staged because television cannot bear a draw.

It may seem crude to leap from such mundane activities to world peace, but the ruling assumption is the same, that internationalism legitimises itself. It rises above (never below) the nation state and its rulemakers owe allegiance only to an ideal of global community, which means whatever they choose. The ever-more numerous world bodies to which the British Foreign Office subscribes need never pass the eye of any National Audit Office.

It was only when America briefly withdrew from Unesco and capped its contribution to the UN that steps were taken to curb that organisation's waste and corruption, which culminated in Kofi Annan's obscene 2000 "poverty summit", which I watched as it gridlocked New York and emptied it of lobsters and champagne.

The only good thing to emerge from the warped brain of America's former UN ambassador, John Bolton, was his reform package, and he blew it. Nor can Europe talk. The EU still cannot get its accounts past any reputable auditor nor control the outrageous expenses of its parliamentarians.

This laxity turned to ghoulishness when Save the Children last week revealed the atrocities against women and children committed by UN peacekeeping troops in Africa. Soldiers thought that the sacred carapace of the blue beret put them beyond ordinary jurisdiction. In a similar, if less brutal, spirit, the World Bank for decades forced indebtedness on bankrupt countries, lest someone cut its gargantuan budget.

We are all still hardwired to treat international as a good thing. In the process we have abandoned the constitutionalism and accountability that should govern any form of government if it is not to run amok. The one facet of neoconservative America that I share is frustration with the UN and related organisations' inability to walk the talk.

It took the UN three weeks just to visit Burma, despite the clear threat to humanity of the regime's response to the cyclone. Meanwhile an American relief convoy is still sitting inert offshore. Ask me which humanitarian intervention is the more plausible and I will reply, ask those facing catastrophe in the Irrawaddy delta.

On these pages earlier this week, the former UN undersecretary, Shashi Tharoor, rang an alarm over the emergence in America of a demand for a "league of democracies", substituting for the UN's globalised inertia. Proposed, by left and right alike, is a coalition of the voting classes, somehow defined and clearly under the leadership of America, to stand out against the half of the world still in the grip of authoritarianism.

Tharoor argued cogently that this would be a regressive move, dividing the globe "just when there has never been greater need for a system of universally applicable rules and laws that will hold all countries together in a shared international community". Excluding China and Russia and polarising the world into goodies and baddies was not the way to get things done.

On this score I think I would relax. A league of democracies would soon turn into another G-8, Council of Europe or Nato political committee. It would stage conferences, demand that something must be done and do nothing but upset those excluded from the fun. But the proposal reflects a craving for an internationalism that is not producer-captured by the UN and others.

The Americans are right, that if you want something done in the world, get a nation to do it, not an inter-nation. I may be opposed to both the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, but there is a significant difference between them noticeable to any visitor to their capitals. In Baghdad, America is unmistakably in charge and the world follows. There is a clear line of command that leads, however misguidedly, to Washington. Things get done.

Afghanistan is the opposite, the embodiment of Tharoor's globalism in practice. Some 30 nations piled into Kabul after 2001, under the banners of Nato and the UN. There was and remains no coherence, no agreed strategy and a perpetual feuding over rules of engagement, use of air power and policies for anti-corruption and counter-narcotics. Things do not get done. Some 10,000 UN, Nato and NGO officials and their hangers-on fall over each other in the streets of Kabul. Command structures overlap. It is a recipe for failure. Yet because the "international community" has given Afghanistan its blessing, the intervention must be benign. It is the ultimate feelgood war.

Some of the best people I know have struggled to do good abroad. They have sacrificed career, home and hearth to help others, even to advance the noble cause of world government against all odds. Thus there are worthy campaigners for a global rule of law, such as Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International, but they are let down by the longwinded international court in The Hague. This moves at the speed of the slowest jurisprudence because it accounts to no one.

Filling this accountability deficit has long been debated by NGOs such as the Red Cross and by UN agencies. It obsesses the few UN activists who know they must reform or lose out to American unilateralism, or to such botches as a league of democracies.

No organisation has a right to live forever purely for being international. Yet such are the bureaucrats who crowd Geneva's nameplate-and, with no more accountability than their neighbours, the Swiss banks. And they grow incessantly. The G-8, once an informal "library chat" of world leaders, has inflated into a chauvinist display of competitive extravagance. As goes the G-8, so goes the world.

Until internationalism can acquire a more robust accountability, there will be more Burmas and more Iraqs. The superpower and the nation state will reassert global sovereignty. International must stop flying first class.

(Simon Jenkins is a veteran British journalist and former editor of The Times)

Safe disposal of solid waste

Md. Rakibul Hassan

Open 'dumping is I a very common waste disposal practice in our country, which is environmentally unsound, unsafe and undeniable. There is a risk of health. and environment in terms of pollution of water resources, emission of green house gases, disease and vector spreading, bed smell, aesthetic disorder and so on. A common scenario in the dump site is obnoxious odor, burning waste and emitting smoke etc. Waste pickers are seen scavenging around the dumping loaders and bulldozers.

Solid waste can not be avoided. By using proper technology we can use wastes as a resource. Waste management is a technique for recycling, reuse or minimizes its adverse effect on the human being. Mainly two types of waste are collected at DCC for processing. Only municipal wastes are used for landfill. On the other hand, reusable hospital wastes are reuse by the processing. Organic hospital wastes are dumped, incinerated. These wastes may be classified into two types-municipal wastes derived from storage, market, restaurant, office building, hotels, institutional and domestic waste. Types of municipal solid waste- food waste, rubbish, ashes, demolition and construction waste etc. Hospital waste- derived from different type of government and non-government hospital, clinic, diagnostic center. Types of hospital waste- tissues, blood products, organs, polythene bags, medicine container, syringe, needle of all types, nozzle of syringes, cover slips, blades, glass, slides etc.

By the definition solid wastes are all the wastes arising from human and animal activities that are normally solid and are discarded as useless or unwanted. Solid waste is defamed as leftover or unwanted material after human consumption or well being and it is the useless byproduct of economic activity. It has no value at the present moment and thrown away as discarded or worthless but a potentially valuable commodity to someone who thrives on it.

Solid Waste Management (SWM) refers to all activities- Generation, Storage, Collection, Transfer & Transport, Processing/Treatment, and Disposal. In accordance with the best principles of- Public health, Economics, Engineering, Conservation, Aesthetic, Social and Environmental aspects and the framework of Administrative, Financial, Legal, Planning, Social and Engineering functions.

Waste management is a technique for recycling, reuse or minimizes its adverse effect on the human being. Some objectives of SWM are given below:

To remove the discarded material from inhabited places in a timely manner in order to prevent the spread of disease, to minimize livelihood of pursuable organic materials. To dispose the material in a manner that is environmentally acceptable.

Waste may be toxic or hazardous that can adversely affect the following components if improperly managed. Some adverse affects of improper management of solid waste are the following environmental issues, such as- Aesthetic displeasure, Public nuisance, Dust, Occupying space, Odor, Vector breeding, Leaching. Health issues, such as-Disease. Flies carries 12 kinds. Cockroach 18 kinds, Rat 22 kinds. Globally affect, such as, Global warming, Acid rain, Ozone layer depletion.

We cannot avoid waste. It may be resource by using proper method which is environmentally acceptable. We have identified some problems those should be minimized. The problems can be overcome through the following recommendation- Segregation process should develop in household level through advertisement or media for avoiding the soil pollution.

The educational opportunity should develop for the child workers and ensure the good heath status. To date, waste reduction has been largely voluntary. A more effective approach must include economic incentives that make it more expensive to waste, and more cost-effective to recycle and reuse. Eventually, consideration must be given to mandatory measures, including disposal bans on locally recyclable materials or mandatory recycling for businesses and residents. Finally, business people in every economic sector including the construction, manufachlring, wholesale, retail and service industries must take responsibility for wise resource use. To take control measure and to reduce the negative impact of open dumping can be mitigate by the construction of sanitary landfill. Although a milestone step has been taken by Dhaka City Corporation (DCC) with the technical assistance and support from the Japan International Co-operation Agency as part of the Clean Dhaka Master Plan. A step by step improvement measures have been tried out in the various place landfill site from open dumping with odor, smoke, scavenging etc. but its limited. If DCC can be implement a sanitary landfill with simple and locally suitable design, materials and construction method of suitable area where mass people protect from various diseases.