Bangladesh Rising, also sinking – mirror to the world

Tea-balls, mirro-finance and ocean-front property

To witness development of commercial tastes among folk who’ve never before had expendable cash with which to make decisions can be interesting. Self-sustenance can fly out the window from the influence of advertising, as things never before even thought about become needs. General parlance calls this progress. Once plastic bags were collected in Thailand to sell in Myanmar; now they’re so ubiquitous governments have initiated propaganda campaigns to limit use.
Have you ever thought how much tea-bags hamper the culinary experience that made tea the world’s most popular beverage? The rectangular tea bag wasn’t invented until 1944, and not only do paper tea bags often contain Epichlorohydrin, a pesticide which becomes active when in hot water, and can cause infertility and harm your immune system, but artificial ingredients are usually used to flavor bagged tea. Plastic tea bags in hot enough water begin to break down, releasing toxins into the tea, and paper ones have usually been chlorine-bleached. Tea companies use pesticides: a 2015 Greenpeace report shows 34 pesticides in Indian tea. As the teas weren’t washed, the pesticides end up in your drink. Also, for best taste, tea must be able to release its flavors properly. When tea brews, the leaves expand, but tea bags offer little room for them to unfurl and swell, limiting real tea flavor. As tea bags often contain only fannings, dust and leftovers after larger leaf pieces are gathered for sale as loose tea, they give a rather astringent, bitter taste, usually overcome through added artificial flavorants and perfumes. This is particularly true of tea blends with fruit or flower aromas.

It’s estimated that by 2025, Bangladesh will have 63 cities with middle class populations of at least 100,000 (compared with 36 now), but this thriving middle class with its yen for convenience has brought about absurd contradictions, as with interest in Tetley and Lipton teas, likely far more traveled than their Bangladeshi consumers!
The tea market of Bangladesh is growing rapidly; sales have increased recently with a rising number of tea stalls offering sit down services. Most Bangladeshis see tea as affordable and refreshing. The top five brands are Ispahani Mirzapur, Lipton Taaza, Tetley, Finlay and HRC. Most started as foreign brands, but now are produced and marketed locally. They aren’t expensive by international standards, but global standards for middle class income are much higher, and the unnecessary packaging and advertising costs are hardly convenient relative to the value of money and the costs of obtaining it. Tea, after all, still grows wild in northern Bangladesh! Not many, though, still drink that.

Bangladesh tea pickers live in isolated villages without electricity or running water, in harsh conditions. Some don’t speak Bengali, particularly marginalized inhabitants of the mountain regions on the border with Myanmar and those living in Sylhet, the land of tea plantations in the northeast. They use Garo, Urwan, or Tripura among themselves, and barely basic Bengali with employers. Their salary is low - 48 to 55 US cents per day. A couple of tin pots, an oil lamp, and a few blankets are all many have. Duncan Brothers, a leading tea company in Bangladesh, which produces 30 million kilos of tea per year, the equivalent of a third of Bangladesh’s total crop, has increased tea pickers’ daily salary and provides huts for workers to live in, plus three kilos of rice per week. In exchange, during the harvest season, between March and December, workers must pick 20 pounds of young leaves per day. Still, as people prefer commercial, packaged teas, there’s more profit to share with workers than there would be otherwise, and conditions are improving – slightly. Workers, though, not infrequently use additional income for coffee and energy drinks.
When Tai (Dai, Zhouang, Yua) from Yunnan entered the area now Shan State, in the 12th century, concerned, perhaps, about Mongol encroachments, some went on across Nagaland to Assam India (1228), just north of Bangladesh, and became Tai Aiton. They surely carried domesticated tea with them. Europeans, of course, had to make it their own. Robert Bruce introduced the Assam tea bush to Europe after encountering it in 1823. He found the plant growing ‘wild’ near Rangpur in Assam while trading in the region, and noticed Singhpo tribesmen brewing tea from it. A Singpho chief, Bessa Gam, showed Bruce how the tea was brewed and consumed, and provided him with samples of the leaves and seeds, which he planned to have scientifically examined. Robert Bruce died shortly thereafter, without having seen the plant properly classified. It was not until the early 1830s that Robert’s brother, Charles, arranged for a few leaves from the Assam tea bush to be sent to the botanical gardens in Calcutta for examination. Then the colonizing British East India Company formed a body of ‘experts’ (the Tea Committee, 1834), to assess the scientific nature and commercial potential of Assam tea. The adherence of its members to the Chinese ideal (in terms of the plant and the method of manufacture) led to the importation of Chinese tea makers and Chinese tea seeds to displace the ‘wild’ plant and traditional methods in Assam. After a while, a hybridized version of the Chinese and Assam teas proved successful in the Assam climate and terrain, and it became called ‘Camellia sinensis var. assamica’ (distinct from the Chinese version (Camellia sinensis var. sinensis, which has smaller leaves).
Connoisseurs and affectionados often use Pyrex glass or small red-clay tea-pots. My mother used a large porcelain one into which she would put an aluminum tea-ball with the tea inside, but preparing hot consumables with aluminum isn’t a huge improvement over ancient Roman lead water-pipes. She also had a small stainless steel teapot, not much bigger than a bracelet charm, for single cups of tea - but the leaves had to be really packed inside, leaving no room to expand.
Real epicurean tea ceremony devotees have much more to say about proper preparation, but I’m not one, and won’t go into tea types here. They are as myriad as coffees, tobaccos, beers or ‘milks’ and milk products, but as cannabis varies extremely, I guess tea can too, somewhat justifying the incredible range in prices! I grow my own, with no fertilizer or pesticide, and after my tea-picking wife soaks, squeezes and dries them, just boil the leaves in a regular steel cooking pot, like for chai tea - but often with astragalus, fresh green herbs, dried mushrooms, licorice root or other dried material of purported health benefits. I then pour it through a strainer into a tea mug. Throwing out the first ‘rinse’ doesn’t make much sense to me as my tea and herbs are from my yard! Often I will boil it a 2nd time, sometimes even almost 24 hours later.

Like most branded teas, Lipton teas, the world’s most popular and restaurant standard, are a blend, selected from different plantations around the world, in Sri Lanka, India, Kenya, and China. Lipton Yellow Label is blended from as many as 20 different teas.
The Tetley Group was bought by India’s Tata Group in February 2000 - Tata Global Beverages markets tea under the major brands Tata Tea, Tetley, Good Earth Teas and JEMČA. Tata Tea is the biggest-selling tea brand in India; Tetley is the biggest-selling tea brand in Canada and the second-biggest-selling in the US and UK. Established in 1837, Tetley was the first to introduce the tea bag to the UK, in 1953. It introduced the round tea bag in 1989 and the ‘no drip, no mess’ drawstring bag in 1997.
The international trade union IUF criticized Tetley in 2009 for not allowing statutory maternity leave to pregnant tea pluckers, and for locking out 1,000 workers on the Nowera Nuddy Tea Estate in West Bengal for so long that local government distributed food coupons for emergency rations to workers and their families. In May 2010, a crop sprayer died of poisoning on a Tata estate in Assam, leading to protests at which two other workers were shot dead by riot police. On 30 January 2012, Tata Global Beverages and Starbucks announced the creation of a 50-50 joint venture called Tata Starbucks Limited, which owns and operates Starbucks Coffee ‘A Tata Alliance’ in India. The company has 51 tea estates in India and Sri Lanka, especially in Assam, West Bengal in eastern India and Kerala in the south. It’s the largest manufacturer of Assam and Darjeeling tea and the second-largest manufacturer of Ceylon tea. Tetley Kenyan Gold is made in the UK from tea leaves grown at high elevations in Kenya.
Tata Group claims belief in “creation of sustainable value” - meaning giving back to society what came from society. It’s been a pioneer in employee welfare, the eight-hour working day, provident funds and maternity leave, instituting them before they became law. In recent years, Tata companies have started using their core competencies to help in sustainable development of communities around the world. But in January 2014, Tata Global Beverages and International Finance Corporation (part of World Bank) were criticized for poor working conditions, low wages, and gross human rights violations in a report released by Human Rights Institute at Columbia Law School. The report alleges Amalgamated Plantations Private Limited , which is partly owned by Tata Tea, was in violation of many of provisions of Indian Plantation Labor Act on its tea plantations in Assam and West Bengal. In March 2014 a documentary on The Guardian news website claimed that Tata Global Beverages was underpaying the minimum Indian wage at an Assam tea plantation which Tata co-owns.
In October 2015, a movement of 6,000 female laborers calling themselves ‘Pempilai Orumai’ ( women’s unity) laid siege to the Munnar tea estates, one of Kerala’s most popular tourist destinations and a subsidiary of Tata Tea’s plantation in Kerala. Trade and tourism were brought to a near standstill. After nine days of protest and marathon negotiations, Tata/Tetley gave in. It was a stunning victory: a group of semi-literate women had taken on the most powerful interests in the state and won. The spark that ignited the protest was a decision to cut the 20% bonus paid to tea pickers, but there was also anger at their one-bed huts without toilets or other basic amenities. While they earn significantly more than tea workers in Assam, they say the 230 rupees (£2.30; $3.50) they are paid for a day's work is just half what a wage laborer in Kerala would get.

To most, Bangladesh, the 8th most populous country, is synonymous with poverty, rivaling Haiti and Congo, but it’s actually not in the bottom 20% of countries (the poorest are in Africa; North Korea, Afghanistan, Solomon Islands, Nepal and Tajikistan are others, but reports vary). Population estimates vary; a 2011 census claimed 142.3 million, but 2016 UN data suggests 163 million, and that doesn’t include 688,000 Rohingyas, and another 200,000 others from Myanmar, in refugee camps. Bangladesh is one of the most densely populated countries in the world; it’s capital, Dhaka, (pop. 15 million) is the most densely populated of all cities in the world. But century old paddle steam boats navigate its beautiful rivers, and old trains occasionally excite ‘train-spotters’. The country faces challenges education, healthcare and corruption, but is one of the largest textile exporters in the world, with major trading partners the EU, US, China, India, Japan, Malaysia and Singapore. In 2008, Bangladeshi female workforce participation stood at 26%, with women dominating blue collar jobs in the garment industry. Agriculture, social services, healthcare and education are major occupations for Bangladeshi women, while their employment in white collar positions is steadily increasing. Handlooms operated by women supply at least 60% of the country’s clothing.
Bangladesh is predominantly rich fertile flat land, but is also riverine, and prone to floods. 79% is delta plains. Most parts are less than 12 meters (40 ft) above sea level. It’s estimated that about 10% of its land would be flooded if the sea level were to rise a meter. Many of the rural poor population live in areas that are prone to extreme annual flooding causing huge damage to their crops, homes and livelihoods. To rebuild their homes, they often have to resort to moneylenders, and that causes them to fall deeper into poverty. In September 1998, Bangladesh saw the most severe flooding in modern world history. As the Brahmaputra, the Ganges and Meghna spilt over and swallowed 300,000 houses, 9,700 km (6,000 mi) of road and 2,700 km (1,700 mi) of embankment, 1,000 people were killed and 30 million more were made homeless; 135,000 cattle were killed; 50 km2 (19 sq mi) of land was destroyed; and 11,000 km (6,800 mi) of roads were badly damaged. Effectively, two-thirds of the country was underwater. The severity of the flooding was attributed to unusually high monsoon rains with unusually large amounts of melt water from the Himalayas, exasperated by widespread cutting down of trees that would have intercepted rain water, for firewood or animal husbandry.
Although more than half of GDP is generated through the services sector, agriculture is considered the largest sector of the economy, making up 18.6% of Bangladesh’s GDP in November 2010 and employing at least 45% of the workforce. More Bangladeshis earn their living from agriculture than from any other sector. The country is among the top producers of rice (4th - it's Bangladesh’s most important product), potatoes (7th), tropical fruits (6th), jute (2nd), and farmed fish (5th). Its per-capita income was US$1,754 in 2018. Bangladesh has one of the world’s oldest tea industries, and is a major exporter of fish and seafood. Bangladesh’s textile and ready-made garment industries are the country’s largest manufacturing sector, with 2014 exports of $25 billion and over 4 million employed in textile sweatshops. Leather-goods manufacturing, particularly footwear, is the second-largest export sector. The pharmaceutical industry meets 97% of domestic demand, and exports to many countries. Garment exports, the backbone of Bangladesh’s industrial sector, accounted for more than 80% of total exports and were on track to again surpass $25 billion in 2017. The sector continues to grow, despite the need for improvements in factory working conditions to avert further high-profile accidents that have killed more than 1,000 workers in recent years. Steady export growth in the garment sector combined with remittances from overseas Bangladeshis - which totaled about $13 billion and 6% of GDP in 2016 - are key contributors to Bangladesh’s sustained economic growth and rising foreign exchange reserves. The recent influx of hundreds of millions of additional refugees from Burma will place pressure on the Bangladeshi government’s budget and the country’s rice supplies, which declined in 2017 in part because of adverse weather. Bangladesh is the world’s third largest Muslim majority country, with Muslims making up more than 80%. Hindus are 10%, Buddhists and Christians 1% and surely there are still some tribal animists. Maybe the rest are agnostic? The urban population is 35.8% of the total; 73% are literate. Youth unemployment is high, ages 15-24 9.4% unemployed.
The Bangladesh Institute of Development Studies has found one-fifth of the middle class does business for income. A person with $US 3 per day is included in the middle class. The 'upper middle class' is people with a daily income of $US 4, which rose to 20% of the population in 2010. Many live on 1.25US$-2US$ per day and so are poor by World Bank standards - 26% of Bangladesh's population gets under $2US per day. 48% of children in Bangladesh are malnourished, and many work more than 45 hours a week, often in rag trade sweatshops. This is an indirect and unintended result of the actions of soulless multinationals and rapacious local entrepreneurs, whose only concern is to take advantage of the profit opportunities offered by cheap labor.
The adult population grew past 100 million in 2015, and had a combined wealth of $US237 billion at that time. Per capita income in Bangldesh is about $14000, ahead of at least 35, maybe 38, other countries. Credit Suisse has identified 1.2 million Bangladeshis as members of the global middle class, with wealth amounting to almost $18,000 each. This burgeoning middle class of business and government workers values foreign brands and has jumped onto the digital IT bandwagon by millions.
Regardless of what one calls middle class, sales in consumer products ranging from foreign cosmetics, air-coolers, refrigerators to passenger vehicles, are at record levels. As tens of millions of “middle and affluent consumers” see their incomes increase, economic growth has been 6%. Bangladeshi consumers differ from most Asian counterparts in having an aversion to accumulating debt - this helps deliver stability, which the country otherwise lacks. The country’s population, young, vibrant and growing, helps propel growth and rising consumerism. It’s estimated that the 84 million really poor, by 2025 will be just 44 million. Purchasing power won’t be limited to major cities like Dhaka and Chittagong, but should extend to Khulna, Gazipur and other cities.

Bangladesh has an impoverished banking system, particularly in terms of services and customer care at government run banks. Private banks try to imitate the banking structure of more developed countries, but are often foiled by inexpert or politically motivated government policies executed by the central bank of Bangladesh, Bangladesh Bank. The outcome is a banking system fostering corruption and illegal monetary activities/laundering etc. by the politically powerful and criminals, making services or the performance of international transactions difficult for general customers of the ordinary citizenry, students studying abroad or through distance learning, foreigners and people entering the middle class but not yet familiar with banking.
Micro-finance, originally to foster tiny owner/operator businesses like roving snack selling, shoe or clothing repair, maybe knife and scissor sharpening (does anybody do that anymore?) or perhaps purchase of a gas-powered steed-blade weed-wacker, worked well for a while as an NGO thing, then went into decline.
Micro-finance as it originated at Bangladesh’s Grameen Bank involves tiny loans to women with fixed terms and amounts, group liability, weekly meetings, forced payments into a group savings account, and a set of 16 social pledges chanted each week while standing at attention. They use groups to facilitate interactions with clients, and may offer various incentives for peer support. The Grameen model spawned imitators around the world, involving a large share of micro-finance clients in India, the Philippines and East Africa. However, formal guarantees and even, in some cases, weekly group meetings have disappeared. Micro-finance grew to enormous scale in Bangladesh, with about 23 million borrowers, the highest population saturation of micro-finance in any country.
Grameen Bank, begun as a government project in 1976 and established in 1983 as an independent bank, provides financial resources to the poor on reasonable terms, to generate productive self-employment without external assistance. Its customers are landless folk who want small loans for all types of economic activities, including housing, with about 70% of them women. Collective rural enterprises also could borrow from for investments in tube wells, rice and oil mills, power looms and for leasing land for joint cultivation. The average loan by the Grameen Bank in the mid-1980s was around Tk2,000 (US$65), and the maximum was just Tk18,000 (for construction of a tin-roof house). Repayment terms were 4% for rural housing and 8.5% for normal lending operations. Grameen Bank extended collateral-free loans to 200,000 landless people in its first 10 years. Amidst a prevailing pattern of bad debts throughout the Bangladeshi banking system, only 4% of Grameen Bank loans went overdue.
Islamic banks can’t pay interest or charge any return on loans, but some Muslims dispute whether interest is equivalent to riba (usury). Lawyers and scholars will argue their way around anything, but, to be consistent with Islamic law, banking and finance can’t invest in business involving alcohol, pork, gambling, pornography or gossip columns, demand late payment charges, or, (Heaven forfend!) engage in the buying or selling of derivatives, options and futures. All transactions must be ‘directly linked to a real underlying economic transaction’, which excludes ‘options and most other derivatives’. In Islamic finance, one must work for profits, and simply lending money to someone who needs it doesn’t count as work. Money must not be allowed to create more money. Instead, a bank must provide some service to “earn” its profits. Still, Islamic banking is seeing impressive growth in Bangladesh, as has also international banking (EXIM, Citibank, HSBC, State bank of India), likely to the detriment of ‘micro-finance’.
Analysts have suggested that micro-credit can bring communities into debt from which they can’t escape; researchers note instances when microloans from the Grameen Bank were connected to exploitation and pressures on poor families to sell their belongings, leading in extreme cases to humiliation, further borrowing, child exploitation, despair and even suicide. Also, micro-credit banks depend on subsidies, thus acting as another example of welfare. In some cases, poor rural families have suffered debt spirals, harassment by micro-finance debt collectors, and the kind of despair their religion was meant to forefend.
By early 2000s micro-finance was clearly ‘all talk, no walk’ – with poverty not actually reduced anywhere. Most local markets in poor countries were already saturated with the simple products and services produced in micro-enterprises. Most micro-financed enterprises eventually fail, sending borrowers deeper into poverty. Interest rates didn’t stay low: in Mexico going up to 80%, in Bangladesh and Bolivia 30-40%... almost no real businesses can service such rates. Dichter’s Micro-credit paradox has it that ‘the poorest people can do little productive with credit, and the ones who can do the most with it are those who don’t really need micro-credit, but need larger amounts and longer credit terms.’ It was just a pretense, much like the pretense that religion trumps money.

More than 100 million people currently live within a meter of the high tide level, and are expected by scientists expert in the subject, to be flooded out by 2040, or at least 2100 (by which time a 3 meter rise appears likely). Maybe the rise will be only half a meter by 2040, but storms will still substantially limit safety. It’s likely that sea level will rise in more than about 95% of seaboard areas. Some ‘experts’ claim they expect a rise of only half a meter by 2100, but more reassuring projections have often turned out to not only be false, but intentional deceptions paid for by vested interests (read: petrochemical concerns and extraordinarily wealthy right wingers). Very conservatively, sea level is expected to rise by 0.8 feet by 2050 and between 3.3 and 4.9 feet by 2100; but increased heavy storm activity means even that will be costly. Global warming is increasing certain types of extreme weather events, including heat waves, coastal flooding, extreme precipitation events, and more severe droughts. Global warming also creates conditions that can lead to more powerful hurricanes - climate change will create refugees by increasing the frequency and intensity of droughts, floods, and cyclones.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change says oceans will rise between 11 and 38 inches (28 to 98 centimeters) by 2100, enough to swamp many cities along the US East Coast. More dire estimates, including a complete meltdown of the Greenland ice sheet, place sea level rise to 23 feet (7 meters), enough to submerge London.
Average global sea level increased eight inches since 1880, but now is rising much faster, particularly on the US East Coast and Gulf of Mexico. The average elevation in Florida is just 6 feet; many places are as little as 3 feet above sea level. Sea level will rise as Arctic ice melts, many islands in the Pacific will disappear, and many millions will be displaced.
Research published early in 2016 in the journal Nature Climate Change suggests that as many as 13 million people live in vulnerable regions along the US coasts, which will be lost to them by 2100 if sea levels rise by 5.9 feet (1.8 m). Sea level rise will affect millions in New York City, Los Angeles and the San Francisco Bay Area. Most vulnerable is Southern Florida. Researcher shows that nearly two million people in Miami-Dade County alone face displacement due to rising sea levels.
In Bangladesh a sea level rise of one meter would submerge a fifth of the country and turn 15 to 30 million people into climate migrants; by 2050 about 25 million people will be affected by the rising sea levels. Khulna, Bangladesh is especially endangered.
Similarly, in the Nile area, if sea levels rise half a meter, 8 million people will be displaced from Alexandria and the Nile Delta, unless they get better flood protection. Without adaptation, 40% of Bangkok will be flooded under just a 0.15 meter sea level rise, which is likely by the 2030’s. 70% of Bangkok would be flooded under an 0.88 meter sea-level rise. New Orleans, Houston, NYC, Algiers, HoChiMinh City (Saigon), Jakarta and Palembang, Indonesia, in China, Shanghai, Tianjin, Shenzhen and Guangzhou, plus Kolkata and Mumbai in India, also Guayaquil in Ecuador, and many more, will be severely affected by even a relatively mild sea-level rise (8 inches by mid-century), even with steady investment in flood-control technology.
Jakarta’s been made even worse by direct human action - as less than half of the city’s 10 million have access to piped water, illegal well digging is rife. This drains underground aquifers, deflating them, and despite heavy rains they aren’t being replenished - as the prevalence of concrete and asphalt limits absorption of rainfall. As a result, about 40% of Jakarta now lies below sea level.
In the Chesapeake Bay area - a flat region that’s been sinking at a rate of 1.1 to 4.8 millimeters per year since the 1940s – many people have boats. They’ve begun preparing for sea rise with a pilot project, based in Norfolk, Virginia. Groups of climate scientists, government people and private citizens are developing recommendations for zoning and construction projects to protect against sea-level rise and storm surge. Their models could be replicated elsewhere, but depend on local funding and organizing, and so are challenging for most communities to develop.
Global warming is likely to create 200 million climate refugees by 2050, but climate refugees currently have no legal rights and are unlikely to gain them in the near future.

There is hope, sort of: in southeastern Bangladesh, experiments have been done since the 1960s to ‘build with nature’. Construction of cross dams has induced a natural accretion of silt, creating new land. With Dutch funding, the Bangladeshi government began promoting the development of this new land in the late 1970s. The effort has become a multi-agency endeavor, building roads, culverts, embankments, cyclone shelters, toilets and ponds, as well as distributing land to settlers. It was expected that by fall 2010, the program would have allotted some 27,000 acres (10,927 ha) to 21,000 families.
Bangladesh has 6 or more billionaires (At $10,000 per HOUR, working 50 hours a week and 50 weeks a year, with no tax or overhead, it takes 40 years to hit a billion. No-one could POSSIBLY be worth that wage!); one who sells tanks and fighter jets had $7 billion frozen by a Swiss bank. Several of Bangladesh’s richest are closely related to top government officials, and several have been charged by The Anti-Corruption Commission in Bangladesh. Leading Bangladeshi businessmen say that military-owned businesses are virtually indistinguishable from other commercial enterprises in the way they operate. Politically, since most Bangladeshis live in fear (for valid reasons), they support and vote for people or a party that they see as a protector. Money being a symbol of power, this translates to them voting for the corrupt. This can be said about politics in general, all inclusively. One of the richest, Ragib Ali, heads Sylhet Tea Company, owns tea estates in Chittagong and Sylhet, and has founded numerous educational institutions. His net worth is $US 250 million.
Meanwhile, there are at least 20 legal brothel villages, including Kandipara and Daulatdia, home to 1,500 prostitutes, some as young as 10 years old, who work in tiny cubicles amidst a maze of dirty alleyways.

https://www.theguardian.com/fashion/2019/feb/25/australian-fashion-brand-workers-earning-51-cents-an-hour-oxfam-reports?CMP=share_btn_fb&fbclid=IwAR2pGGAeTfNoJ1M_PBTpgFP_ngrqgvinJk8EsSTRK6dGjx7UcmSS1LaDH8I