Bangladeshis Clinging To Receding Coast; As Migration Mounts, India's Border Fence Nears Completion

[hatrack]

Even where the land has not gone, it is becoming harder and harder to live on. A two-hour drive north of Gabura, we stopped in the village of Kamira Bazar. Like much of the delta region, it floods each every year, but the flooding has been getting worse, the waters are staying longer, and contaminating the fields and the wells with salt.

I stood looking over the flooded fields that belonged to Sheikh Shetta. "It's never been this bad," she told me. "We haven't been able to grow anything properly here for five years." Water from the local well is no longer drinkable. As Rahman, the environmentalist, puts it: "Climate change has a taste, and it tastes of salt. Freshwater is being polluted and contaminated and overcome by saltwater."

This area borders India, where the authorities are building a border barrier, a high fence of reinforced barbed wire that cuts through the paddy fields. Soon it will completely encircle Bangladesh, 2,100 miles of it.

International migration, millions of poor and desperate people pouring across borders, is a sensitive subject here, but it is clearly one factor in India's thinking. The fence is due to be completed by March next year.

EDIT

http://worldblog.msnbc.msn.com/archive/2009/12/07/2144395.aspx

[Cirque du So-What]

1. I'm not claustrophobic

but the notion of being trapped in a country that is slowly getting drowned in the ocean gives me the willies. It's time for the United Nations to step in, as this is clearly a humanitarian rescue effort.

[pscot]

5. What's the U.N.supposed to do?

There are 162 million Bangladeshis crowded together in an eroding landscape 1/3 smaller than the U.K. The population is growing. They can't feed themselves now, and the suggestion that they should stop having so many children is shouted down with cries of cultural imperialism. No Asian country wants them as refugees, and I doubt that any Western nation will accept them. Any politician who seriously pursued the idea would be chased out of office. Maybe if the Antarctic warms up enough they can be resettled there.

[madrchsod]

2. the next world war will be in asia

probably china and india over the control of natural resources.


what india is doing could be genocide

[David__77]

3. How would such a thing materialize?

China would certainly not invade India. Do you see India invading China? What resources? Where?

[reggie the dog]

4. for water perhaps?

[NickB79]

6. "China would certainly not invade India"

In a world of diminishing natural resources and billions of mouths to feed, anything is possible.

[David__77]

7. I cannot fathom such a scenario with the present regime in China.

The current authorities would not engage in such an adventure. If there were a change in government, meaning the overthrow of the Communist Party of China, perhaps. But the latter is highly unlikely.