The New Nation - Internet Edition

Price of chemical fertilisers

THE Ministry of Industry, that is responsible for production, import and distribution of fertilisers, has reportedly fixed the price of Urea fertiliser at ten thousand Taka per ton against the prevailing rate of four thousand eight hundred Taka. It also fixed the price of Muriate of Potash (MoP) at Taka fifty thousand per ton against the previous price of Taka nineteen thousand and five hundred. The upward adjustment of price for fertiliser has been made for the first time since 1996 and a day after the announcement of the national budget for 2008-09 fiscal year. The end is to lessen the burden of subsidy given by the government.

It is worth noting that subsidy on fertiliser has been increased from the estimated amount of twenty-two billion Taka of forty billion Taka in the current fiscal year of 2007-08. The price of fertiliser has increased due to uptrend in the price of inputs and also due to increase in the import price.

The price of urea fertiliser will be Taka 10 per Kg in coming fiscal year, against the current price of Taka 6.50 on an average. The price of Muriate of Potash (MoP) will be around Taka fifty per kg. The ultimate users of chemical fertiliser in the farm sector will bear the burden of higher price.

The farming community in Bangladesh have to pay higher price even for polluted fertilisers that are marketed in the country. Sometimes the imported items are not delivered to the local market on time. Marginal farmers are affected adversely due to non-availability of fertiliser. The leaders of the business community, dealing with the farming people, however, noted the price hike of urea in the international market and looked for support of the official agencies. The farming community have produced a bumper crop of rice and saved the food sector from market volatility. The import of chemical fertiliser and use thereof on time at fair price should therefore, be the main objective.

City's groundwater level falls

AS reported in the media quoting a recent study, the ground water level in Dhaka is dipping because of a massive extraction. Posing serious threat of land subsidence experts warn, the groundwater level is declining by up to three metres every year. The extraction caused a sharp drop leading to two cones of depression in water level and the upper parts of the aquifer are dewatered throughout the area, except for swathes of northeast and southeast corners, says the study that was carried out jointly by experts and academics.

How fast the dewatering process deep under the surface worked due to the massive extraction of water from underground is revealed by the study that says about 4.1 crore cubic metres of the aquifer dewatered until 1988, which increased to 227.2 crore cubic metres in 2002. The groundwater level was declining at an alarming rate and dewatering was spreading to the adjoining areas too. Dewatering widened by as much as 55 times in 20 years and experts stressed increasing the use of surface water to cut pressure on groundwater. According to the information of the Dhaka Water Supply and Sewerage Authority, upto 180 crore litres of water is pumped out in Dhaka and Narayangonj every day though the demand for water in both the places is much higher for meeting the daily requirements.

Meanwhile, the use of surface water has begun and under a plan it has been decided to use 100 crore litres surface water a day by 2015 with a view to reducing the pressure on groundwater as its level has been dropping alarmingly. There are about 2,000 deep tubewells operating in the capital - 800 out of them with WASA-approval. About 85 per cent of the WASA's water comes from underground sources and the remaining 15 per cent from surface water.

Tropical cyclone: A major threat to costal people

Redoy Hassan

Hazard is the broadest term and reflects a potential threat to humans as well as the impact of an event on society and the environment. Similarly coastal hazard is defined as a phenomenon in which it has potentially very dangerous occurrences along, near relating to a cost that is brought about by the interaction between people and nature.

Although coastal areas are varied in topography, climate and vegetation, they are generally dynamic environments. Continental and oceanic processes converge along coasts to produce a landscape that is characteristically capable of rapid change. The impact of hazardous coastal processes is considerable, because many populated areas are located near the coast.

There are different types of coastal hazards such as tropical cyclone, tidal flood, storm surge, tsunami and coastal erosion. Among them the most serious coastal hazard is tropical cyclone for our country, which claim many lives and causes enormous amounts of property damage every year.

Simply tropical cyclone is defined as a cyclone that develops over tropical ocean and has winds up to hurricane's force. More specifically when a storm revolves round a centre, it is termed a cyclone.

Tropical cyclone forms and grows over warm ocean water drawing its energy from latent heat. The earth rotation causes the wind to follow a curved path over the ocean which helps give tropical cyclone its circular appearance. Tropical cyclone forms, maintaining its strength and grows only when it is over ocean water that is approximately 270c. Such warm temperature causes large amounts of water to evaporate, making the air very humid. This warm water requirement account for the existence of the tropical cyclones, seasons which occur generally during a hemisphere's Summer and Autumn. Because water is slow to warm enough for tropical cyclones to occur in the Spring. Tropical cyclone needs more than 270c sea temperature for its initial formation; such as high surface temperature is necessary to produce a steep Laps Rate (The change of atmospheric air temperature with altitude is called the Laps Rate) for maintaining the vertical circulation in a cyclone. This condition is met throughout the year in region of the Bay of Bengal where cyclones are formed mostly near the Andamans.

The magnitude and frequency of tropical cyclone are not affected by human activity. Most tropical cyclones usually occur at latitudes greater than 50 N or 50 S. The cyclones are generated as tropical distances and dissipate as they move over the land. Wind speeds in these storms are grater than 100 km per hour, and the winds blow in a large spiral around a relatively calm center called the eye of the hurricane.

Tropical cyclones, known as typhoons in most of the Pacific Ocean and hurricanes in the Western Hemisphere, cause damage and destruction from high winds; river flooding that results from intense precipitation and usually causes more deaths and destruction than the wind; and storm surges (Wind- driven oceanic water) that are the most lethal aspect of tropical cyclones.

Bangladesh has been affected by tropical cyclones several times. Tropical cyclones of 1948, 1960, 1970, 1991, 1998 and SIDR of 2007 were the most catastrophic cyclones. Tropical cyclones have taken hundreds of thousands of lives in a single storm. A tropical cyclone that struck in the northern Bay of Bengal in Bangladesh in November of 1970 produced a 6-meter rise in the sea. Flooding killed 300,000 people, caused $63 million in crop losses, and destroyed 65 percent of the total fishing capacity of the coastal region.

There are several effects of tropical cyclone in Bangladesh which are as follows-

Most cyclones with storm surge sometime wash over entire offshore island and large areas on the coast.

Astronomical tides in combination with cyclonic surge lead to higher water level and hence serve coastal flooding.

Disruption of human settlement.

Causalities of living beings.

Destroy of vegetation.

Change of land use pattern.

Creates tidal flooding which causes great losses of coastal areas.

Damage of buildings, homes, bridge, roads and other infrastructures.

Ecological disruption of coastal areas.

So, it seems that cyclone causes a great havoc and is usually followed by scarcity of food and outbreak of various diseases such as cholera, dysentery, diarrhea, fever etc which spread all over the affected areas.

In our country people adjust to the tropical cyclone hazard either by doing nothing and bearing the loss or by taking some kind of action to modify potential loss. Bearing the loss is probably the most common individual adjustment.

Attempts to modify potential loss include strengthening the environment with protective structures and land stabilization, and adapting behavior by better land use zoning, evacuation, and warning. Inhabitants in area with a serious tropical cyclone hazard, such as coastal Bangladesh are very much aware of the hazard. In Bangladesh, perception of the cyclone hazard was influenced by people's economic and cultural backgrounds. It was found that the people are not particularly concerned about the hazard, and the three socioeconomic classes perceive the cyclones in the same way.

Although repeatedly devastated by tropical cyclones, coastal areas in Bangladesh do not have an integrated system of private or public adjustment. Although people there are aware of the hazard, the adoption of adjustments is not a function of the frequency of cyclones. Even when shelter is available, people are reluctant to leave their homes. During a 1970 cyclone, approximately 38 % of the people saved their lives by climbing trees, 5% took shelter in a two-story "community center," and 8% remained on top of an embankment designed to protect the land against saltwater intrusion. Thus people saved their lives during that cyclone.

People's attitudes toward cyclonic damage and the possibility of preventing or modifying damage are related to their educational level and their cyclone experience. Public awareness programs in areas likely to experience tropical cyclones should thus be matched to the educational level of the target group. Furthermore, since better-educated people tend to be more positive toward damage prevention, increased attention should be given to the less educated population to counteract their tendency to lack confidence damage-prevention measures. Awareness programs also should be designed differently depending on the area's history of cyclone experience.

However the great loss caused by cyclones can be reduced to a substantial extent. Using modern technologies of weather forecasting (i.e. GIS, Remote Sensing), prior warning can be given to the people who are likely to be affected by the cyclone. The people and domestic animals can be shifted to the cyclone shelters. Moreover, a quick relief, medical treatment and essential medicines should be made available to the affected people just after a terrible cyclone.

Recently the devastating SIDR has passed away with its mighty effects and NARGIS didn't touch Bangladesh. This is the time of cyclones and storms. How much we are prepared to face another mighty Tropical Cyclone?

Iraq, Palestine and the alternate reality of Bush world

Bouthaina Shaaban

YET another conference on the Iraq mess was convened in Stockholm last week while President Bush was speaking to the Air Military Academic cadets in Colorado. In both events, President Bush and Secretary Rice were speaking about an Iraq that exists only in the minds of the speakers, and is so far removed from reality that millions of Iraqi widows, orphaned children and the physically maimed in addition to a million Iraqis who lost their lives and five millions displaced.

Bush speaks about fighting enemies and adversaries anywhere in the world. But who is the enemy and the adversary? "When rulers know we can strike their regime while sparing their populations, they realise they cannot hide behind the innocent, and that means they are less likely to start conflicts in the first place".

If we were to apply this statement to Iraq, Palestine, Lebanon and Afghanistan, can President Bush say that he has hit the regimes and spared the people? What is he talking about when we recall what has happened to the Iraqi people of death and destruction?

Perhaps what the members of American administration say about Iraq should be read in the light of what is taking place in Iraq, and in the light of what few Americans, who were liberated of the administration pressures, say about Iraq such as Zbigniew Brzezinski, President Carter and the latest is Scott McClellan, who was the White House spokesperson from 2003-2006 and whose book, What Happened: Inside The Bush White House and Washington Culture of Deception, in which he explains how Bush misled the US and the world about the war on Iraq: "The decision to invade Iraq", he says, "was a serious strategic blunder". Richard Clark, the previous head of countering terrorism in the White House, said that leaving the American forces in Iraq is helpful to Al Qaeda.

Ricardo Sanchez, who was the commander of the American forces in Iraq, also wrote a book, Wiser in Battle: a Soldier's story, in which he exposed the lies of former defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld and other senior officials to justify the war on Iraq.

McClellan emphasises that both Bush and his advisers confused propaganda with news. He also accuses two previous senior advisors of Bush, Karl Rove and Scooter Libby, of deceiving him in order to lie about their role in leaking the name of the CIA agent Valerie Plame in vengeance of her husband Joseph Wilson, who unravelled the deliberate lies of the Bush administration about Iraq buying uranium from Niger for military purposes which turned out to be a lie as well.

McClellan says they "both encouraged me to repeat the lie time and again," claiming that he did not discover that it was a lie until journalists started digging for the truth after two years.

The machine of the supposedly "free Press" is being used in order to market fabricated lies for pre-designed purposes which bring death and destruction to millions of innocent people. In such a climate, truth becomes an orphan searching for an exit in an ocean of lies and waves of propaganda campaigns.

The New York Times of May 28 said, "Carter is right to say the unsayable' and the unsayable is the truth of Israeli possession of 150 nuclear heads directed against the people of tens of Arab capitals". Carter has said the unsayable before, though, when he published his book in 2006 under the title: "Palestine, Peace and Apartheid", which caused him a storm of false accusations and irresponsible responses from groups who support occupation, settlement and ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians, the indigenous people of Palestine. Carter's visit to the region and his meeting with Hamas has also earned him the anger of pressure groups who only pressure against Arabs and for the sake of Israel no matter how horrid the Israeli measures against the Palestinians and Arabs are.

But the unsayable truth is also being said today by Desmond Tutu, who is the head of the investigation committee formed by the UN Human Rights Council to investigate the massacre perpetrated in Beit Hanoun by the Israeli occupying forces in 2006 whose result was the killing of an entire family of Al Athamna. The victims included five women and eight children who were killed in their homes by Israeli shelling.

Tutu said: "What is happening in Gaza is unacceptable and is disgraceful to the entire humanity."

This also falls within the unsayable because no one is expected to highlight the horrors of what Israel is perpetrating against the Palestinians because these horrors are not consistent with the image of a democratic state as it is portrayed by the Western media.

Propaganda campaigns also target British academicians who are trying to boycott Israeli universities because of the role they are playing in supporting the policies of Israel in killing and destroying the Palestinians.

We have to remember that Britain took a leading role in highlighting the crimes of the South African Apartheid regime in the seventies and eighties of the last century, and today British academicians are the pioneers of pointing out the only way to uncover the real face of Israel's racist and settlement policies and their disastrous consequences on the indigenous people of Palestine.

The only reasonable conclusion is that, Iraq and the Middle East, both look bright and prosperous from Stockholm to those who travel in their luxurious private jets from their air-conditioned and comfortable offices to 7-star hotels and who have the ability to speak about humanity and peace in a way that makes them look human to the audiences of satellite TVs. But far away from them are the people of Palestine and Iraq who can only smell death and blood and who cannot even find a piece of white cloth to wrap their dead children.

Between those making speeches in Stockholm and the hell called Iraq, there is a huge gap filled by millions of displaced people, by a way of life that is totally destroyed and by the fear that this is not the end of the story.

(Dr Bouthaina Shaaban is Syria's Minister of Expatriates. A professor of English literature, she taught at Damascus University and abroad for several years, until 2002.)

Beyond the race barrier

Eric S. Margolis

WE HAVE just witnessed one of the most exciting events in modern American political history.

African-American Barack Obama's hard-won triumph in the Democratic Party presidential primaries is not only an historic event, it's a great and proud moment for America.

In late August, the Democratic convention will formally nominate Obama, 146 years after Abraham Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation that freed America's black slaves, and exactly 45 years after Martin Luther King delivered his epochal speech, 'I Have a Dream,' that began the political liberatmion of America's black citizens.

The nomination of the first non-white to a major party nominee for president ought to make all Americans stand taller. The rest of the world is certainly cheering. America has regained its reputation of being a nation where anything is possible.

The media keeps calling Obama a 'black.' But the junior senator from Illinois is technically not a 'black' at all. His father was a black Kenyan, his mother a white from Kansas. Obama is as much white as black.

In the West Indies, where I used to live, Obama would properly be called a mulatto, a group that ranked just below whites in Afro-Caribbean and Latin American culture.

Obama, who sips herbal tea and listens to Mozart, is much closer to white, liberal, upper middle class society than America's traditional black culture or working class whites.

Though I dislike the term, he is precisely an 'African American,' or a 'person of colour.' The much-admired former president of Ghana, Jerry Rawlings, was, like Obama, the product of a black-white union.

Though Obama is not really a black man in the North American sense of the term, his candidacy has revealed the racist underbelly of the United States, particularly among southerners, blue-collar workers, and evangelical Christians.

Hillary Clinton helped open this Pandora's box, and Republicans will be certain to keep the lid open during the campaign.

Many Jewish Americans are also spreading anti-Obama prejudice. An intense campaign is going on among Jewish groups warning that Obama is 'soft on Israel' or even a closet Muslim. "I don't trust that schwartze in a suit," as one New Yorker puts it, using the dismissive Yiddish expression for blacks.

Even Obama's ritual pledges of loyalty to Israel before Washington's mighty Israel lobby this week did not allay such hostility. American Jews traditionally made up half of the Democratic Party's financial donors, and used to be the party's rock-solid liberal core. But Republican John McCain has been luring Jewish voters away with his ardently pro-Israel stance and intensifying threats against Iran, which have now reached a fever pitch.

The next big question is, who will Obama choose for vice-president. Angry feminists and menopausal women, Hillary's core supporters, are demanding Obama name her as his running mate.

But given Hillary Clinton's 40 per cent negative ratings nationally, her questionable ethics, and the prospect of Obama being stuck in a ménage a trois with Hillary and Bill Clinton, he would do well to look elsewhere for a candidate who can bring balance and experience to the ticket.

By refusing to graciously concede defeat weeks ago, and raising the race issue, Mrs Clinton put her political career before the party. She also inflicted serious damage on Obama, keeping him on the defensive.

Most Americans have had enough of eight years of the Clinton's political slipperiness and unethical behaviour. They - and the rest of the world - are clearly fed up after eight years of the catastrophic George W. Bush.

The nation craves dignity and honour in the White House. Either Obama or McCain will be a hugely welcome change.

Newcomer Obama has served only one Senate term. Veteran senator and war hero McCain will crucify him over the inexperience issue. So Obama badly needs a highly experienced political and foreign policy ally for vice-president with Washington know-how, like Senators Joe Biden or Chris Dodd, or able Gov. Bill Richardson.

As for John McCain's vice-presidential choice, he is now flirting with a Louisiana governor Bobby Jindal, whose parents came from India, and Colin Powell as potential 'dark-skinned VPs,' and with former Hewlett Packard company boss Cory Fiorina to attract female voters.

Obama has broken America's race barrier, but sadly the 2008 campaign promises to be as much about skin colour as policy and character.

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