To protect Sundarban, its stewards must change
Posted on 08. Dec, 2007 by Mikey Leung in Sundarbans
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This story republished from the New Age, Friday, Dec. 7, 2007. Because the new age stories do not stay online permanently, the editors of Joybangla.info saw it fit to be re-published here. Photo by Belinda Meggitt.
It is estimated that between 5 and 10 million people who live along the coastal belt and the fringe areas of Sundarban depend on the forest resources for their livelihoods. Notwithstanding the fact that it is these communities who have lost almost all their possessions and livelihood to the destruction that the cyclone wrought, it does not take a great deal of imagination to estimate the impact the government’s latest decision will have on the coastal economy. The reality remains that the forest department, as it is now, is the arch enemy of any realistic and meaningful protection and conservation of Sundarban, writes Mahtab Haider
EVER since cyclone Sidr, the idea that Bangladesh must protect Sundarban as its strongest line of defence against tropical cyclones has been gaining currency among policymaking circles. It has taken the carnage and destruction of a cyclone like Sidr to wake the government to the reality that the tidal mangroves of Sundarban offer a kind of protection to the coastal belt that all the cyclone shelters and coastal embankments cannot. The idea of a green belt along the coast is not new, such proposals have been gathering dust in the ministries for decades, and if history is a key to predicting the future, will continue to do so as the lessons learnt from Sidr give way to less far-thinking and more ad hoc solutions.
What is alarming is the military-driven interim government’s reaction to the idea of protection of Sundarban: a typically colonialist, paternalistic and undemocratic reaction that is in line with a clutch of decades-old policies – ironically enough, inherited from British colonialists – that have led to the destruction of much of our forests. When officials of the Department of Forests told reporters on Tuesday that it was going to seek foreign funds for the strengthening of infrastructure within Sundarban, and for its protection plans, alarm bells went off among those who know the destructive and corrupt nature of the department. On Wednesday, the predictable outcome of the ministry’s newly-acquired interest in conserving Sundarban bore a predictable fruit. The environment and forest adviser, CS Karim, along with top ministry officials, decided that they would bar the entry of fishermen, woodcutters, and honey-collectors from entering Sundarban for the coming year.
It is estimated that between 5 and 10 million people who live along the coastal belt and the fringe areas of Sundarban depend on the forest resources for their livelihoods. Notwithstanding the fact that it is these communities who have lost almost all their possessions and livelihood to the destruction that the cyclone wrought, it does not take a great deal of imagination to estimate the impact this decision will have on the coastal economy. Sundarban does not have any human habitation within its core areas, the terrain is too unfriendly and the tidal waters too brackish to allow agriculture. It is the people from the neighbouring districts that come to Sundarban at different times of the year to earn their living through fishing, harvesting nypa palms (locally called golpata) and for honey collection regulated by the forest department. For each of these activities, these groups pay for permits to enter the forest and a tax based on what they are harvesting. Needless to say, this is how they have earned their living for generations, long before there was a government to tax their harvest. These are not timber barons who enter the forest with massive trawlers and trucks to cart thousands of tonnes of timber away on a weekly basis. These are communities who have traditionally co-existed with Sundarban for centuries, economically incapable of taking more than what earns them a little bit of money over what their costs of diesel and trawler are. If that were not the case, Bagerhat, Khulna and Patuakhali would be among the more prosperous districts in Bangladesh.
The forest department, on the other hand, has no such benign record. Those who are familiar with the ways of Sundarban will know the incredible corruption that the forest department officials participate in on a daily basis, empowered as the sole state-accredited stewards of the forest. Not a fishing trawler or a band of woodcutters can enter and leave the forest with produce, having paid just the legal fees set by the government. The bribes they pay to the forest department are so extortionary, in fact, that they are compelled to harvest larger amounts of golpata or fish than they traditionally have in order to compensate for the bribes they have to pay. While the forest department exploits the community extractors of natural resources in this way, it allows free reign for the large fish merchants and timber harvesters backed by or operated by local political leaders. In fact, and this is a fact that aptly describes the department’s role, the top bureaucrats at the department are notorious for owning sawmills themselves, sometimes more than a few. The example of former chief conservator of forests Osman Gani, arrested earlier this year for having earned tens of crores of taka illegally through bribes, is representative of the problem. Gani subsequently told law enforcers that he would get a monthly payment of about Tk 5 lakh from each of the divisional forest officers of Rangamati and Khulna. About Tk 1 crore in cash was seized from Gani’s house during his arrest. By the time the law enforcers finished investigating him, they found roughly Tk 4 crore in liquid assets in his possession.
Can the arrest of even a handful of top officials of a government agency change its character? Are we to assume that Gani’s arrest is a landmark event that has curbed corruption within the department? How then does the forest department reserve the moral authority to restrict the traditional rights of access to Sundarban that provides the livelihood of millions of families along the coastal belt? Most of all, who was consulted before this undemocratic decision was adopted? Which of the conservationists and experts who have any familiarity with Sundarban will be foolhardy enough to back this decision? Were the local communities consulted? In the absence of a parliament, what gives an interim government to enforce such a draconian law? Sixty years after foreign colonisers were ousted from this land, the interim government under advice from its forest department, remains faithful to their policies and their customs. The reality remains that the forest department, as it is now, is the arch enemy of any realistic and meaningful protection and conservation of Sundarban.
It is pertinent to mention here that in 1998 the forest department loaned $77.5 million from the Asian Development Bank for what was titled ‘The Sundarban Biodiversity Conservation Project.’ Under the project, the department was to be strengthened so as to be able to better conserve the biodiversity of Sundarban. The project was unilaterally cancelled by the ADB in 2005, after a lion’s share of the project funds had already been spent (53 per cent of the total budget for foreign consultancy services, 11 per cent for local consultants, 6 per cent for international travel and 2 per cent for local travel) according to a study by the NGOs Unnayan Onneshan and Nijera Kori. While that project was ongoing, the department had adopted a similar policy of disallowing traditional harvesters from entering Sundarban. The result was predictable. Not only did the department endorse theft of timber within Sundarban increased in the duration of the project, it was the large timber traders who were the beneficiaries of the project as the coastal communities were unable to pay the heavy bribes that the forest department demanded. Needless to say, the timber traders recuperated these costs many times over, at the cost of Sundarban’s well-being, and the livelihoods of the millions who depend on it for their survival.
It is not entirely the forest department’s fault that it has emerged as the enemy of biodiversity and conservation in Bangladesh. In the past decade, the country’s forest cover has shrunk from a little over 5 per cent in the late 1990s to as little as 3 per cent today. The basic stumbling block is that the department’s traditional orientation is to view forest resources not as part of an ecosystem but literally as money in the form of timber. Inside the department there is little emphasis on wildlife conservation or knowledge of biodiversity as there is on calculating how large swathes of forest can be replaced with fast-growing monoculture timber that can fetch the best prices. What local communities harvest from Sundarban cannot destroy that ecosystem in the way that the department’s forest management policies can. In fact, nypa palm or golpata regenerates at a faster rate if it is harvested annually. The mangroves are among the most resilient plant species in the world. If the government really wants to protect Sundarban, it should abandon its foolhardy plans to replant the coast with ‘matching species’ as it has suggested, and should instead restrict large commercial extractors from entering the forest. Projects across the world have shown that mangrove regeneration is fast and natural when it is left to its own devices. The reality is that this coming year too, timber theft will continue in Sundarban hidden from the eyes of the common people who will be prevented from entering the forest, and under cover of a repressive, undemocratic, and colonialist decision.
Mail the author: mahtabhaider@NOSPAMgmail.com (remove the NOSPAM tag).
