Ben Beaumont, Oxfam GB - UK on AlertNet 24 Dec 08;
It’s worth thinking about just why the delaying tactics of some countries at the UN climate change conference in early December is so damaging. Their inability to move discussions on is going to cost lives - it’s as simple as that.
And the people affected are those in the poorest countries of the world - countries like Bangladesh. I visited the south west of the country just before the Poland discussions, to see for myself the impact that climate change is already having on people there.
The future for people living in the south west corner of Bangladesh is bleak. If we don’t act quickly, it’s difficult to imagine what they will do. Rising sea levels (they’re projected to rise up to 1.5m by the end of century, putting 15 per cent of Bangladesh under water) are engulfing their land with salt water, which destroys their crops, not to mention their homes.
As a result, many small farmers sell their paddy fields to shrimp farmers, who create shrimp ponds for export. The trouble is, a shrimp farm employs far fewer people per hectare than paddy. So many find themselves out of work, and without food. What can they do?
They are faced with a choice, of sorts. They could go into the nearby Sundarbans mangrove forest in search of fish and honey. Sounds simple enough, but not when you consider that the forest is the home of the Bengali tiger, which is killing the husbands, fathers and sons of this region at an alarming rate.
Or they could wrench their whole family from their ancestral home to the slums of already overcrowded cities, in Bangladesh and over the border in India. If they’re lucky, they could find infrequent, underpaid work, maybe as a rickshaw wallah, or in a brick-making factory. And that’s only if they can save the bus fare out in the first place.
This is what faces heroic women like Farida Khatun, 35, a mother of four whose own husband was killed by a tiger six years ago. “He went fishing in the Sundarbans with his brothers,” she says. “When he was pulling the last net up, he told the others to go on ahead. A tiger came out of the grass and took him away to the forest. We never found his body.”
Farida reckons that the number of men being eaten by tigers is “increasing day by day. The population is growing and food prices are rising. To survive, we either have to migrate to India or go into the Sundarbans. My two oldest sons are in the Sundarbans fishing now. Of course I worry about them, but we have no alternative. There are no other jobs, and if they didn’t go, we wouldn’t eat.”
Farida’s stark choice is repeated by countless others here. It confirmed for me why conferences like that in Poland (and, next year, Copenhagen) are so important - and why developed countries need to show real leadership and act decisively to avert catastrophe.
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