Bangladesh drowning?
Refer to the article Bangladesh drowning: A reality or a myth? By Faruque Hasan
This article highlights several cultural challenges facing the people of Bangladesh.
If Bangladesh were a European country, its engineers would be capturing much of the silt that passes down the rivers of the country and using that silt to gradually build up the elevation of the land, and they would probably have been doing this systematically for the past two hundred years. It is not as though there is insufficient manpower in Bangladesh to carry out such work, and if the people of Holland were able to reclaim vast amounts of land from the sea hundreds of years ago, why are the people of Bangladesh unable to undertake simple civil engineering work today to help solve their problems?
I suspect that the reasons have little to do with economics, although they have much to do with the culture of poverty that the people of Bangladesh appear to embrace.
What a rich and productive country Bangladesh could be, built upon vast amounts of rich silt as it is and with no shortage of water to irrigate the fields, and with endless amounts of sunshine to cause crops to grow in abundance.
You can possibly complain that I do not comprehend the difficulties faced by Bangladesh, or possibly you believe that my comments are racist in promoting what Europeans would do given a similar situation. Any excuse will do. However, if the Egyptians were able to build the world's foremost civilisation in the Sahara desert over 5,000 years ago, there is in reality no valid reason for Bangladesh not being a prosperous and wealthy country, except that its people do not believe that such things are possible and are unwilling to do what is needed to improve their lot.
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