7 Billion

by National Geographic

  And believe it or not, it’s a population success story as well. To whittle its high birthrate, Bangladesh developed a grassroots family-planning program in the 1970s that has lowered its fertility rate from 6.6 children per woman in 1977 to about 2.4 today—a historic record for a country with so much poverty and illiteracy. Fertility decline has generally been associated with economic improvement, which prompts parents to limit family size so they can provide education and other opportunities to their children. But Bangladesh has been able to reduce fertility despite its lack of economic development.

  “It was very hard in the beginning,” says Begum Rokeya, 42, a government health worker in the Satkhira District who’s made thousands of home visits to persuade newlywed couples to use contraception and plan their family’s size.

  “This is a very conservative country, and men put pressure on women to have lots of children. But they began to see that if they immunized their kids, they wouldn’t need to have a bunch of babies just so a few would survive. They like the idea of fewer mouths to feed.”

  Working in partnership with dozens of NGOs, Bangladesh has made huge strides in educating women and providing them with economic opportunities; female work-participation rates have doubled since 1995. Its economy is growing, helped by its garment-export industry. And Bangladesh has managed to meet an important UN Millennium Development Goal: Infant mortality dropped dramatically between 1990 and 2008, from 100 deaths per 1,000 births to 43—one of the highest improvement rates among low-income countries.

  In Dhaka such successes are dwarfed by the overwhelming poverty and the constant influx of villagers, prompting organizations, including BRAC, to get involved in helping village people figure out how to survive in a deteriorating environment. “Our goal is to prevent people from coming to Dhaka in the first place, by helping them adapt and find new ways of making a go of it in their villages,” says Babar Kabir, head of BRAC’s climate change and disaster management programs. “Big storms like Aila uproot them from the lives they know.”

  IBRAHIM KHALILULLAH HAS LOST TRACK of how many times he’s moved. “Thirty? Forty?” he asks. “Does it matter?” Actually those figures might be a bit low, as he estimates he’s moved about once a year his whole life, and he’s now over 60. Somehow, between all that moving, he and his wife raised seven children who “never missed a meal,” he says proudly. He’s a warm, good-natured man, with gray hair cut short and a longish gray beard, and everything he says has a note of joy in it.

  Khalilullah is a char dweller, one of the hundreds of thousands of people who inhabit the constantly changing islands, or chars, on the floodplains of Bangladesh’s three major rivers—the Padma, Jamuna, and Meghna. These islands, many covering less than a square mile, appear and vanish constantly, rising and falling with the tide, the season, the phase of the moon, the rainfall, and the flow of rivers upstream. Char dwellers will set out by boat to visit friends on another char, only to find that it’s completely disappeared. Later they will hear through the grapevine that their friends moved to a new char that had popped up a few miles downstream, built their house in a day, and planted a garden by nightfall. Making a life on the chars—growing crops, building a home, raising a family—is like winning an Olympic medal in adaptation. Char dwellers may be the most resilient people on Earth.

  There are tricks to living on a char, Khalilullah says. He builds his house in sections that can be dismantled, moved, and reassembled in a matter of a few hours. He always builds on a raised platform of earth at least six feet high. He uses sheets of corrugated metal for the outside walls and panels of thatch for the roof. He keeps the family suitcases stacked neatly next to the bed in case they’re needed on short notice. And he has documents, passed down from his father, that establish his right to settle on new islands when they emerge—part of an intricate system of laws and customs that would prevent a million migrants from the south, say, from ever squatting on the chars. His real secret, he says, is not to think too much. “We’re all under pressure, but there’s really no point to worry. This is our only option, to move from place to place to place. We farm this land for as long as we can, and then the river washes it away. No matter how much we worry, the ending is always the same.”

  Even in the best of times, it’s a precarious way of life. And these are not the best of times. In Bangladesh climate change threatens not just the coast but also inland communities like Khalilullah’s. It could disrupt natural cycles of precipitation, including monsoon rains and the Tibetan Plateau snowfall, both of which feed the major rivers that eventually braid their way through the delta.

  But precisely because the country’s geography is prone to floods and cyclones, Bangladeshis have gotten a head start on preparing for a climate-changed future. For decades they have been developing more salt-resistant strains of rice and building dikes to keep low-lying farms from being flooded with seawater. As a result, the country has actually doubled its production of rice since the early 1970s. Similarly its frequent cyclones have prompted it to build cyclone shelters and develop early-warning systems for natural disasters. More recently various NGOs have set up floating schools, hospitals, and libraries that keep right on functioning through monsoon season.

  “Let me tell you about Bangladeshis,” says Zakir Kibria, 37, a political scientist who serves as a policy analyst at Uttaran, an NGO devoted to environmental justice and poverty eradication. “We may be poor and appear disorganized, but we are not victims. And when things get tough, people here do what they’ve always done—they find a way to adapt and survive. We’re masters of ‘climate resilience.’”

  Muhammad Hayat Ali is a 40-year-old farmer, straight as bamboo, who lives east of Satkhira, about 30 miles upstream of the coast but still within range of tidal surges and the salinity of a slowly rising sea. “In previous times this land was juicy, all rice fields,” Ali says, his arm sweeping the landscape. “But now the weather has changed—summer is longer and hotter than it used to be, and the rains aren’t coming when they should. The rivers are saltier than before, and any water we get from the ground is too salty to grow rice. So now I’m raising shrimps in these ponds and growing my vegetables on the embankments around them.” A decade ago such a pond would have been a novelty; now everyone, it seems, is raising shrimps or crabs and selling them to wholesalers for shipment to Dhaka or abroad.

  Sometimes, though, adaptations backfire. Throughout southern Bangladesh, villages and fields are shielded from rivers by a network of dikes built by the government with help from Dutch engineers in the 1960s. During floods the rivers sometimes overflow the dikes and fill the fields like soup bowls. When the flood recedes, the water is trapped. The fields become waterlogged, unusable for years at a time.

  Decades ago things got so bad in Satkhira—so many fields were water-logged, so many farmers out of work—that members of the local community used picks and shovels to illegally cut a 20-yard gap in an embankment, draining a huge field that had been waterlogged for nearly three years. In doing so, they were emulating Bengali farmers of earlier times, who periodically broke their embankments and allowed river water to enter their fields, rising and falling with the tides, until the deposited sediment raised the level of the land. But this time the villagers were charged with breaking the law.

  Then a funny thing happened. The field, which had been left open, acquired tons of sediment from the river and grew higher by five or six feet. The river channel deepened, and fishermen began to catch fish again. Finally a government study group came to survey the situation and wound up recommending that other fields be managed the same way. The villagers were vindicated, even hailed as heroes. And today the field is covered with many acres of rice.

  “Rivers are a lifeline for this region, and our ancestors knew that,” Kibria says as he walks an embankment. “Opening the fields connects everything. It raises the land level to make up for the rise in sea level. It preserves livelihoods and diversifies the kinds of crops that we can grow. It also keeps
thousands of farmers and fishermen from giving up and moving to Dhaka.”

  BUT EVERY ADAPTATION, no matter how clever, is only temporary. Even at its sharply reduced rate of growth, Bangladesh’s population will continue to expand—to perhaps more than 250 million by the turn of the next century—and some of its land will continue to dissolve. Where will all those people live, and what will they do for a living?

  Many millions of Bangladeshis are already working abroad, whether in Western countries, in places such as Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, or in India, where millions fled during Bangladesh’s 1971 war of independence against Pakistan and never returned. Millions more have slipped across the frontier in the decades since, prompting social unrest and conflict. Today India seems determined to close and fortify its border, girding against some future mass migration of the type hypothesized in Washington. It’s building a 2,500-mile security fence along the border, and security guards have routinely shot people crossing illegally into India. Interviews with families of victims suggest that at least some of the dead were desperate teenagers seeking to help their families financially. They had been shot smuggling cattle from India, where the animals are protected by Hinduism, to Muslim Bangladesh, where they can fetch up to $40 a head.

  But if ten million climate refugees were ever to storm across the border into India, Maj. Gen. Muniruzzaman says, “those trigger-happy Indian border guards would soon run out of bullets.” He argues that developed countries—not just India—should be liberalizing immigration policies to head off such a chilling prospect. All around Bangladesh bright, ambitious, well-educated young people are plotting their exit strategies.

  And that’s not such a bad idea, says Mohammed Mabud, a professor of public health at Dhaka’s North South University and president of the Organization for Population and Poverty Alleviation. Mabud believes that investing in educating Bangladeshis would not only help train professionals to work within the country but also make them desirable as immigrants to other countries—sort of a planned brain drain. Emigration could relieve some of the pressure that’s sure to slam down in the decades ahead. It’s also a way to bolster the country’s economy; remittances sent back by emigrants account for 11 percent of the country’s GDP. “If people can go abroad for employment, trade, or education and stay there for several years, many of them will stay,” he says. By the time climate change hits hardest, the population of Bangladesh could be reduced by 8 to 20 million people—if the government makes out-migration a more urgent priority.

  For now, the government seems more interested in making climate adaptation a key part of its national development strategy. That translates, roughly, into using the country’s environmental woes as leverage in persuading the industrialized world to offer increased levels of aid. It’s a strategy that’s helped sustain Bangladesh throughout its short, traumatic history. Since independence, it has received tens of billions of dollars in international aid commitments. And as part of the accord produced at the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen in 2009, nations of the developed world committed to a goal of $100 billion a year by 2020 to address the needs of poor countries on the front lines of climate change. Many in Bangladesh believe its share should be proportionate to its position as one of the countries most threatened.

  “Climate change has become a kind of business, with lots of money flying around, lots of consultants,” says Abu Mostafa Kamal Uddin, former program manager for the government’s Climate Change Cell. “During the global financial meltdown, trillions of dollars were mobilized to save the world’s banks,” he says. “What’s wrong with helping the poor people of Bangladesh adapt to a situation we had nothing to do with creating?”

  TWO YEARS AFTER the cyclone, Munshiganj is still drying out. Nasir Uddin and his neighbors are struggling to wring the salt water out of their psyches, rebuild their lives, and avoid being eaten by the tigers that prowl the village at night, driven from the adjacent Sundarbans mangrove forest in search of easy prey. Attacks have risen as population and environmental pressures have increased. Dozens of residents around Munshiganj have perished or been wounded in recent years—two died the week I was there—and some of the attacks occurred in broad daylight.

  “It’s bad here, but where else can we go?” Uddin says, surveying the four-foot-high mud platform where he’s planning to rebuild his house with an interest-free loan from an NGO. This time he’s using wood, which floats, instead of mud. The rice fields around his house are full of water, much of it brackish, and most local farmers have begun raising shrimps or crabs in the brine. Deep wells in the village have gone salty too, he says, forcing people to collect rainwater and apply to NGOs for a water ration, which is delivered by truck to a tank in the village and carried home in aluminum jugs, usually balanced on the heads of young women. “You should take a picture of this place and show it to people driving big cars in your country,” says Uddin’s neighbor Samir Ranjan Gayen, a short, bearded man who runs a local NGO. “Tell them it’s a preview of what South Florida will look like in 40 years.”

  As the people of Munshiganj can attest, there’s no arguing with the sea, which is coming for this land sooner or later. And yet it’s hard to imagine millions of Bangladeshis packing up and fleeing en masse to India, no matter how bad things become. They’ll likely adapt until the bitter end, and then, when things become impossible, adapt a little more. It’s a matter of national mentality—a fierce instinct for survival combined with a willingness to put up with conditions the rest of us might not.

  Abdullah Abu Sayeed, a literacy advocate, explains it this way: “One day I was driving on one of the busiest streets in Dhaka—thousands of vehicles, all of them in a hurry—and I almost ran over a little boy, no more than five or six years old, who was fast asleep on the road divider in the middle of traffic. Cars were whizzing by, passing just inches from his head. But he was at peace, taking a nap in some of the craziest traffic in the world. That’s Bangladesh. We are used to precarious circumstances, and our expectations are very, very low. It’s why we can adapt to just about anything.”

  Chapter 5: Food Ark

  BY CHARLES SIEBERT

  Charles Siebert is the author of The Wauchula Woods Accord: Toward a New Understanding of Animals. Jim Richardson documented the importance of soil to our food supply in the September 2008 issue.

  In China 90 percent of the wheat varieties cultivated just a century ago have disappeared. Experts estimate that we have lost more than half of the world’s food varieties over the past century. As for the 8,000 known livestock breeds, 1,600 are endangered or already extinct.

  All the food crops we eat today were developed and diversified about 10,000 years ago in these relatively few regions, first identified by the great Russian botanist Nikolay Vavilov in the early 20th century.

  Why is this a problem? Because if disease or future climate change decimates one of the handful of plants and animals we’ve come to depend on to feed our growing planet, we might desperately need one of those varieties we’ve let go extinct. The precipitous loss of the world’s wheat diversity is a particular cause for concern. One of wheat’s oldest adversaries, Puccinia graminis, a fungus known as stem rust, is spreading across the globe. The pestilence’s current incarnation is a virulent and fast-mutating strain dubbed Ug99 because it was first identified in Uganda in 1999. It then spread to Kenya, Ethiopia, Sudan, and Yemen. By 2007 it had jumped the Persian Gulf into Iran. Scientists predict that Ug99 will soon make its way into the breadbaskets of India and Pakistan, then infiltrate Russia, China, and—with a mere hitch of a spore on an airplane passenger’s shoe—our hemisphere as well.

  Roughly 90 percent of the world’s wheat is defenseless against Ug99. Were the fungus to come to the U.S., an estimated one billion dollars’ worth of wheat would be at risk. Scientists project that in Asia and Africa alone the portion of wheat in imminent danger would leave one billion people without their primary food source. A significant humanitarian crisis is
inevitable, according to Rick Ward of the Durable Rust Resistance in Wheat project at Cornell University.

  The world’s population is expected to reach seven billion people this year. By 2045 it could grow to nine billion. Some experts say we’ll need to double our food production to keep up with demand as emerging economies consume more meat and dairy. Given the added challenges posed by climate change and constantly mutating diseases like Ug99, it is becoming ever more urgent to find ways to increase food yield without exacerbating the genetic anemia coursing through industrialized agriculture’s ostensible abundance. The world has become increasingly dependent upon technology-driven, one-size-fits-all solutions to its problems. Yet the best hope for securing food’s future may depend on our ability to preserve the locally cultivated foods of the past.

  IT TOOK MORE THAN 10,000 YEARS of domestication for humans to create the vast biodiversity in our food supply that we’re now watching ebb away. Selectively breeding a wild plant or animal species for certain desirable traits began as a fitful process of trial and error motivated by that age-old imperative: hunger. Wild wheat, for example, drops its ripened kernels to the ground, or shatters, so that the plant can reseed itself. Early farmers selected out wheat that, due to a random genetic mutation, didn’t shatter and was thus ideal for harvesting.

  Farmers and breeders painstakingly developed livestock breeds and food crops well suited to the peculiarities of their local climate and environment. Each domesticated seed or breed was an answer to some very specific problem—such as drought or disease—in a very specific place. The North American Gulf Coast Native sheep, for example, thrives in high heat and humidity and has broad parasite resistance. On the remote Orkney Islands, North Ronaldsay sheep can live on nothing but seaweed. Zebu cattle are more resistant to ticks than other cattle. In Ethiopia a small, humpless, short-horned cattle breed called the Sheko is a good milk producer that withstands harsh conditions and has resistance to sleeping sickness.