Why are villagers in Bangladesh using spoons and sponges to clean up an oil spill?
Oil coated the Shela River near Mongla, Bangladesh on December 12, 2014. Thousands of gallons of oil have spilled into the protected Sundarbans mangrove area, home to rare Irrawaddy and Ganges dolphins, since a tanker collided with another vessel there on December 9. [See Devastating Oil Spill Threatens Rare Dolphins and Bengal Tigers]
To answer that question -- why are they using spoons and not silver spoons? -- you have to ask why an area of the world once called "The Paradise of Nations" by a Persian emperor, once possibly the richest region in the Indian subcontinent, would be dubbed a "basket case" by former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger.
To answer the question of why Bangladesh must resort to spoons to scoop up some 77,000 gallons of fuel oil, why the world is not rushing to its aid with the latest high-tech equipment , when,
With no emergency response services in the area, ship owner Padma Oil Company has begun paying locals for any oil they can collect...
you must study the riches to rags history of Bangladesh: the history of the
Dutch East India Trading Company; of the
Royal Dutch Shell Oil Company; of the
Titas Gas Transmission and Distribution Company Ltd, formed as a joint venture company between the government of Pakistan and Royal Dutch Shell Oil Company in 1964; and of the Burma Eastern Limited Co. founded in 1965 and later renamed
Padma Oil Company Limited. Padma is allowed to haul oil through the ecologically sensitive areas near the mouth of the Ganges, but it doesn't even have spoons when it comes to clean-up: it has to ask villagers to come to its aid.
To answer the question of why a state-owned oil company is even allowed to exist in a nation on which the shrewd eye of Goldman Sachs has been turned to examine its potential as a Next Eleven emerging economy, you would have to make the connection between Bangledeshi independence in 1971 and a looming oil crisis that would break in 1973. Although in the language of development, Bangladesh's "share of external trade in GDP is pitifully small," one has to keep one's options open. Are there no prisons? Are there no workhouses? There would be, and high tech equipment for cleaning up oil spills too, if Bangladesh would hurry up and step into the Next Eleven.
How does a nation that defiantly clings to its independence survive? According to the CIA World Factbook (yes, the CIA provides the public with more information than just a redacted executive summary on torture and its Manual of Trickery & Deception):
Bangladesh's economy has grown roughly 6% per year since 1996 despite political instability, poor infrastructure, corruption, insufficient power supplies, slow implementation of economic reforms, and the 2008-09 global financial crisis and recession. Although more than half of GDP is generated through the service sector, almost half of Bangladeshis are employed in the agriculture sector with rice as the single-most-important product. Garment exports, the backbone of Bangladesh’s industrial sector and 80% of total exports, surpassed $21 billion last year, 18% of GDP. The sector has remained resilient in recent years amidst a series of factory accidents that have killed over 1,000 workers and crippling strikes that shut down virtually all economic activity. Steady garment export growth combined with remittances from overseas Bangladeshis, which totaled almost $15 billion and 13% of GDP IN 2013, are the largest contributors to Bangladesh’s current account surplus and record foreign exchange holdings.
Yes, Bangledesh's pitiful share of external trade has been mostly garments at the cost of an untold number of lives. When will they catch up with the rest of society? (
sarcasm font, if you please.)
Are there no prisons? Are there no workhouses?
Never mind that in the past twenty years, poor little Bangladesh has seen "the biggest gains in the basic condition of people’s lives ever seen anywhere." This includes a rise of 10 years in life expectancy, outpacing the life expectancy of twice-as-rich neighboring India by four years; an enrollment of 90% of girls in school in an 89% Muslim society; infant mortality rate more than halved; a fall in child mortality of two-thirds and maternal mortality of three-quarters. In spite of all this, Bangledesh remains a basket case. When will they wise up and privatize their oil? When will they accept the bounty of real development and allow the world to help them?
The belief that growth brings development with it—the “Washington consensus”—is often criticised on the basis that some countries have had good growth but little poverty reduction. Bangladesh embodies the inverse of that: it has had disproportionate poverty reduction for its amount of growth. [See The path through the fields]
Que sera sera. Is there any profit in helping Bangladesh clean up oil that has no commercial value? No. Why, then, would a laissez faire "Washington consensus" say more than
"Let them eat oil"?