The New Nation - Internet Edition

Energy uplift merits priority

THE demand for inclusion of energy as topmost priority sector in the manifestos of political parties for the forthcoming national election was echoed by some political leaders at a discussion meeting held at the National Press Club in Dhaka City the other day. Political parties were so long concerned with promises of political nature. Now they are to declare concrete programmes for economic development of the country. This marks an encouraging development.

Availability of energy is crucial for the development of the economy. Energy consumption is an indicator of a country's economic development. The USA and India, representing six percent and 15 percent of world's population, consume some 30 percent and one percent of world's energy. Bangladesh's energy consumption is nowhere near these countries. Still predominantly an agricultural country, it will have to shift to an industrial economy to survive the tough competition of the 21st century. Agriculture is also increasingly becoming mechanised and has become dependent on power for irrigation. Power generation falls short of the demand of about 4,600 mw by over one thousand megawatts. Lack of farsighted policy over a period of almost forty years gave rise to this development.

In the government's Power Policy Statement, the demand for electricity has been projected to be 15,000 mw by 2020. The country must concentrate on developing its own infrastructure of power generation. In a situation of fast depleting gas reserve, coal-based power generation seems to be the best possible immediate option. Nuclear power generation with necessary safety measures is another potential alternative. Harnessing renewable energy sources including water and air current and solar energy can be other important modes. The commitment of the political forces in this respect would be very useful to formulate a realistic power generation strategy.

Productivity in jute industry

ACCORDING to experts as reported recently by media, jute can be used in manufacturing more value-added products 'to revitalise' the industry that involves hundreds of thousands of farmers and workers. Four of the country's private sector jute mills have gained 10 per cent additional productivity without increasing costs under a Japanese 'Kaizen' management method or continuous improvement. Japanese and Bangladeshi experts, involved in the process, expressed their optimism that the method could strengthen competitiveness globally and improve the quality of jute products, leading to an increase in value and volume of exports.

The Japan International Cooperation Agency selected two sub-sectors - software and jute - to support Bangladesh's export diversification efforts at the request of the government and sent an expert team through the pilot project. The 'Kaizen' method, recognised as effective, in South East Asia and South America, would be replicated in jute mills to help boost productivity. It has been acknowledged that the Kaizen process would reduce costs of production. Revitalisation of jute and diversification of products would help add more items to the country's narrow export basket.

The country's major export items include readymade garments, frozen food, jute and jute goods, leather, tea and pharmaceuticals. Export destinations are also a few - the USA and the European Union, although Bangladesh exports 166 items to 176 countries. Jute and jute goods accounted for 90 per cent of exports way back in 1972 and that came down to 25 per cent in 1991, and to approximately four per cent in 2007 despite incremental growth in jute exports in value. A researcher, however, explained that the decline of the jute sector was caused by competition with synthetic products, old machinery in mills, low quality of products besides rampant corruption and widespread management inefficiency.

Importance of National Agriculture Day

Maswood Alam Khan

We Bangladeshis would have very much enjoyed starting our Bangla New Year on Pahela Agrahayan, the month when our farmers are all smiles, the month when our people are all agog with expectations of reaping a good harvest from their fields. Pahela Agrahayan heralds the dawn of winter, the advent of the sweetest Bangla season Hemanta, a festive season of fulfilling promises sworn to wives and children---and also to friends, relations, and moneylenders.

In our rural homes it is in Agrahayan when the master of the house buys his wife a sought-after 'nilambori sharee' (a deep blue lady's costume in a single long piece of cotton clothe) and a 'naakfool' (a nose ornament of gold ring for wearing on pierced nostril wall), to cite only two examples of prizes family members wait for a year to receive.

This month brings smiles on the children's faces when they get their gifts of new shirts, frocks and shoes they all had been nagging for at their parents throughout the year.

Because, this is the seasonal time when our farming brothers and sisters reap and sell the harvest of their 'aman' rice, the traditionally primary cash crop of Bangladesh, and get substantial cash in hand to dispose to fulfill their promissory commitments and to splurge on hobbies and creature comforts.

This is the time when like many other mothers my mother also used to prepare our family for winter. Under her personal supervision all our woolen garments, 'leps' (comforters) and blankets would have been out of the trunk and spread out in the sun to get rid of the yearlong naphthalene smell.

This is exactly the time when I, as a kid, used to get hugely excited at the thought of snuggling down under the comfort of a blanket at night. A calming fragrance from trees and shrubs spreads out at twilight reminding you of the arrival of a new season. Suddenly, to your surprise, an afternoon at 5 PM looks and feels like 6 in the evening. Agrahayan morphs your mind magically to a pleasant frame of mood!

Our heartiest congratulations to the present caretaker government for their decision to declare Pahela Agrahayan as our national agriculture day! It is indeed a historical declaration recognizing the existence of our bread providers who had never earlier been honored as an esteemed community of professionals and whose vocation has always been looked down as lowly.

From now on, at least on this auspicious day of Pahela Agrahayan we would take a pause from the humdrum of our nonagricultural activities, bow our heads down in honor of our farmers and entrepreneurs involved in agriculture, and reflect on their contributions in sustaining our very life and our economy. This day will remind us of how fortunate we are that the sweats of our farmers' brows have ensured our achieving autarky in food. This day should also prod us to reckon how cruel we have all along been in depriving them of their dues.

Pahela Agrahayan has rightly been chosen as our national agriculture day. In fact Agrahayan (a Bangla word meaning the forerunner of a phase or a year) had to be the first month of our Bangla calendar if our indigenous cropping pattern were considered with a view to collecting maximum amount of revenue at the initial month of a year. But, with a view to glorifying Mughal emperor Akbar's reign in India, the first day of Bangla year, Pahela Baishakh, had to be coincided with the date 14 April, 1556, the day Akbar ascended to the throne and the day Bangla calendar was officially introduced. Based on solar calendar our Bangla calendar, which in fact was originally designed to be a harvest calendar, is always behind English Georgian calendar by 594 days.

Nevertheless, our farmers await the arrival of Agrahayan with fervor, enthusiasm, and expectations. At the very beginning of Agrahayan our village people tidy up their homes.

They clean the weeds, and unnecessary growths in and around their homesteads, seal up holes and burrows to ferret out mice and other burrowing animals and insects. Ladies paste walls and floors with layers of gluey mud blended with cow dung.

The home granaries are repaired and refurbished. The front yard where paddies are to be thrashed by walking cows upon the sheaves and dried in the sun before husking is made impeccably labeled, washed and trimmed.

The first thumping sound on the yard while unloading bales of fresh-cut paddies from bullock carts rings in ears as the sweetest music in our rural abodes where farmers and their family members most passionately wait for this bijou moment. The whole village is enraptured with the sweet aroma of ripen paddies.

A sleepless month sets in for farmers and their assistants to carry on cutting paddies at daytime and thrashing paddies at nighttime. Lest workers engaged at night overseeing the jobs of thrashing paddies sleep or feel drowsy nightlong festive functions of 'Jaari Gaan' (folk songs) and 'Puthi Path' (storytelling from old manuscripts on myths) are arranged around the paddy-thrashing-yards. Interesting legends like "Gazi Kalu Champabati", "Jarina Shundari", "Rupban", "Faisal Muluk o Badiuz Zamal", "Hanifa's Kahini", "Karbalar Kahini", "Chand Showdagarer Kahini", "Gunai Bibi", and many more are loudly read and recited in rhymes around the yards and throughout the night and punctuated by folk songs and stick dances---all with a twin view to preventing the workers from sleeping and to keeping family members bubbling over with merriments.

A new festivity full of sounds and hues intoxicate the whole landscape of rural Bangladesh in the month of Agrahayan!

An 'out of this world' 'payesh', an indigenous dessert made of 'aatap' rice (sunned rice), milk, bananas, coconut, and molasses, and a variety of cakes are offered to all and sundry whoever visit a farmer's house on the day of husking rice from dried up paddies as a mark of gratitude to the Providence.

Hindu ladies religiously draw geometrical and floral figures and sketches on their walls and floors in white paints made out of liquid pigment of sunned rice-powder.

We celebrate our Eids and Pujas with religious fervor and enthusiasm. We also observe our other national anniversaries like Bijoy Dibash and Ekushey February with appropriate measures of gaiety or sobriety. But we will observe our new 'national agriculture day' altogether differently from other festivities. It is a day only for joys, songs, meals, and merriments!

On this day our government should declare who was the best farmer in the yesteryear. This is the best day to hand national awards to the national heroes who contributed to our agriculture.

We must not pass the day in the concrete jungles of our towns and cities. On our national agriculture day we must be present around the front yards where fresh-cut paddies will land with thumping sounds of music.

On the night of this day we must burn the midnight oil till the break of the next day listening to rhymes and music of our folk poems and songs at our village homes. On this day we have to sweeten our tongues and teeth with 'payesh' made of newly reaped sunned rice-powder. So, we need a public holiday on Pahela Agrahayan to make the day really attractive and meaningful.

Buzzwords, politics and US Elections

Ramzy Baroud

There are a few buzzwords that every American politician, aiming for high office must utilize, even if disingenuously, to have a reasonable chance at getting elected.

President-elect, Barak Obama's constant use of terms like 'hope' and 'change' contributed greatly to the overwhelming support he has experienced by the American public. Many, admiringly so, have overcome a legacy of racial division and prejudice that has defined America for decades, if not centuries. In that regard, voting to office a bi-racial candidate is truly an historic event.

John McCain had an impossible disadvantage to overcome, and failed miserably. He was judged largely based on the many blunders of Republican President George W. Bush, and was evidently caught between a rock and a hard place: to distance himself completely from Bush's legacy, he would risk losing a large margin of his conservative base; to embrace it completely, he would have no chance of broadening that already shrinking constituency. Thus, he too resorted to clichés and buzzwords, which eventually lost any relevance and merely constituted ample material for television comedians: 'maverick', 'straight talker', and, of course, 'Joe the Plummer.'

His desperate and repeated attempts to breathe life into and push forward his under funded, unpopular campaign were of no use. However, his choice of Alaska's governor Sarah Palin as his running mate might go down in history as his greatest blunder of them all.

The fact is, both candidates, McCain and Obama, had much more in common than they would care to admit, as they voted to fund the Iraq war, supported offshore drilling, backed the plan to bail out Wall Street, appealed to the 'middle class', never the many millions of poor Americans, and brazenly demonstrated their undying love for Israel, right or wrong. Any truly independent assessment would most likely show that commonalities between both candidates - especially towards the end of their campaigns - ran too deep that would render designations of them as 'opponents', engaged in constant 'debates', particularly puzzling.

Each candidate also exploited certain advantages over the other. Watching Hilary Clinton's frenzied yet futile campaign to secure the Democratic Party nomination, McCain learned to be very vigilant while scorning his opponent. Any remark that could be misconstrued as a racial commentary was avoided at every turn. Aside from all sorts of anti-Muslim and anti-Arab remarks, actions and inactions, the McCain-Palin campaign steered clear of the issue of race. At one point, McCain assured an anxious supporter of him that Obama is not an Arab, but a "decent family man."

Obama too would tirelessly acknowledge that his opponent was a great "American hero." Not one mainstream news network, commentator or 'expert' failed to solemnly accept McCain's heroism while serving as a Navy pilot in Vietnam, and for having his aircraft shot down in the fall of 1967 on a routine bombing mission in Hanoi. McCain's heroic mission entailed the leveling of a power plant in a heavily populated area. Naturally, little is known about the Vietnamese victims of McCain's 'heroic' missions, for whom the 'straight talker' had nothing but utter disdain. "I will hate them as long as I live," he told reporters in 2000, while traveling in The Straight Talk Express campaign bus.

Both campaigns were generously supported by corporate money, but with Obama being the clear favorite, as his victory chances were palpably higher than McCain's.

To a higher degree than McCain, Obama's rhetoric was riddled with inconsistencies and contradictions. This is to be expected from any politician in US politics, but Obama again proved to be superior.

Both candidates accused the other of accepting funds from shady sources, including Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae, whose failures contributed largely to the US financial crisis and subsequent economic recession. The Washington Post reported in August 27, 2008 that "two members of Mr. Obama's political circle, James A. Johnson and Franklin D. Raines, are former chief executives of Fannie Mae." Raines, who was accused of shady dealings himself, which generated him more than $50 million (according to New York Times John Steele Gordon) just before the collapse of the company was, according to the Boston Globe, put in charge of finding Obama's vice-president, the ardent pro-Israeli supporter, Joe Biden.

In fact, Obama's picks for his future administration seem, thus far, consistent with the choices he made for his campaign advisors. Early news reports already speak about an Obama team consisting of Washington's 'experts" and "old guard." An early ominous sign greeted hopeful Obama supporters just hours after he was declared a winner, when he chose Rahm Israel Emaneul as his White House Chief of Staff. Not only is Emaneul the opposite depiction of unity, hope and change, but one must also question his true commitment to the United States. "His volunteer service in Israel during the 1990s Gulf War is no fiction, with the Jewish press hailing Emanuel's ascension as a sign that Israel will have its own man in the Obama White House," wrote Elana Schore in the British Guardian on November 6. In fact, theories are already rife regarding the relationship between Obama's choices and the support he received from the pro-Israeli lobby in Washington during the campaign, despite his 'irksome' middle name and his unsettling 'ties' to world-renowned Palestinian intellectuals Edward Said and Rashid Khalidi.

It needs to be said, if Obama's rise to power provides any positive indications at all, it is that the popular mood has been fundamentally altered in its perceptions regarding race and gender in politics. But the elections tell more about the American voters, than those for whom they voted. The fact that Obama is half African-American or that Biden supposedly grew up in harsh circumstances - or that Palin is a woman and McCain's airplane was shot down - should be of no essence at all insofar as their policies, decisions and leaderships are concerned. That would be determined by time and experience, although the early signs are hardly promising.

(Ramzy Baroud (www.ramzybaroud.net) is an author and editor of PalestineChronicle.com. His work has been published in many newspapers and journals worldwide. His latest book is The Second Palestinian Intifada: A Chronicle of a People's Struggle (Pluto Press, London).

Plant more trees, go green

Mohammad Shahidul Islam

It cannot be denied that Bangladesh is fast acquiring desert conditions due to the wanton destruction of our trees. When we travel on the highways of Chittagong-Cox's Bazar the huge heaps of logs piled near timber depots, to be taken for sawing later, reminds us how fast we are destroying the work of nature by cutting down trees for the service of man. No one takes care to plant trees to replace them. This is the very case with all other kinds of trees that are ruthlessly cut down to satisfy our economic and other needs.

The all important roles trees play in controlling the climate, soil and other water resources and the disastrous effects of cutting them down is well known. Trees, whether they are timber trees in our majestic forests or shade and ornamental trees in our cities, highways and home-gardens are a national asset.

Once any tree is destroyed there is no other force which could replace immediately the enormous damage that is caused. Even a tree which has taken a number of years to grow up to its full stature could be completely destroyed within a short period of time but the loss is irreparable.

Imagine a forest without trees-what would happen to the flora and fauna that live under the cover of its trees. We must remember that more than half of the population of the endemic plants in Bangladesh will disappear for ever from the face of the earth once their host trees are destroyed. In addition, we must also take every action to preserve the existing trees, be they large or small, of economic importance or not. Trees are like human beings.

Their environment affects their size, longevity, rate of growth and even their usefulness. In the human society we have psychologists to deal with those who go out of tune with their Environment.

The problems we human beings face are creations by us but the numerous problems that trees and plants are faced with are not their own creations. They have been created for them by man and animals.

Thus as much as in the human personality there are aberrations in the plant world too. Bangladesh has undergone a drastic climatic change during the last few years. We have cleared forests and destroyed them in regions where their presence would have been an asset to the well-being of the country.

Due to the indiscriminate felling of trees periodic drought conditions are becoming more and more severe thus affecting the economic and living conditions of all of us.

The elderly people of Bangladesh knew the value of trees and planted them by roadways and in forest reserves. This added to the natural beauty and the coolness of the environment. In those days it was considered a great sin to cut down any live tree and those who did so were severely rebuked and criticized.

Forests play a great role in a nation's economy and climate and they contribute immensely towards its scenic grandeur. When trees are cut down springs dry up, the soil gets eroded and the air becomes less humid. Thus the entire balance of nature is upset. When we destroy forests, droughts, unfavorable climatic changes, soil erosion, lack of water resources and even disastrous floods are the results.

The protection of our trees is no folly and the public, specially the younger generation, must be made to realize the value and usefulness of trees which form a sound foundation for the economic, cultural and social development of the entire country.

Drawing schoolchildren and teachers into the awareness program to grow more and more trees in this predominantly agricultural country could be a very thoughtful suggestion as schools are the most suitable institutions that could bring a change in the nation's attitude towards this all important aspect of conserving trees.

In addition through the network of the nation's schools the ideas and attitudes of parents and elders about the important role of flora in our lives could be increased to a very great extent. As living close to nature and drawing inspiration from trees and plants have formed an intrinsic part of our heritage we must bring back our children to live in harmony with nature.

The nation's children should be made to be aware of the adversities of the wanton destruction of trees and the great benefits that can be derived by the conservation of trees and plants.