Vanishing forests and exploited workers
Audity Falguni studies the pain and agony of loss
Critiques of Policies and Practices
The Case of Forests, Ethnic Communities and Tea Workers of Bangladesh
Philip Gain, Lucille Sircar, Shamimul Islam
Society for Environment and Human Development (SEHD)
LEAF Storm, the first novel by widely acclaimed author Gabriel Garcia Marquez, depicts the pain of native South Americans and the indigenous Red Indian people in the city of Arakataka, Colombia, against the backdrop of commercial banana plantation by the US based United Fruits Company. The novel narrates brutal oppression by the multinational company of local plantation workers and grabbing of their own land and forest resources for the sake of earning cash.
The novel reflects conditions in today's Bangladesh when commercial pineapple and banana plantations get expanded in the Modhupur sal forest, depriving the indigenous Garos and Koch people of their own land. Besides commercial fruit plantation, our government has actually established plantations of alien and exotic species like rubber, acacia and eucalyptus in the Modhupur sal forest (shorea robusta) with loan grants from the Asian Development Bank (ADB) and the World Bank (WB), causing severe consequences for ethnic communities.
It is owing to the "forest policy" prescribed to our government by large international organizations like WB or ADB that around 217,790.3 acres of land from 83 Mouzas in three hill districts were classified as reserved forests between 1990 and 1998 by the Ministry of Environment and Forest (MoEF). It turned thousands of indigenous people homeless and landless overnight. Sangthuima (age 24) and Thuisangma (age 20), two Khyang sisters in a remote village in the Chittagong Hill Tracts (CHT), thus had almost all of their three acres of cropland and even their homesteads notified as reserved forests which they actually inherited from their father Teng Hla Prue. The land is still recorded in his name. They have implicitly become illegal on their own land. Around 2,343 Khyang people (according to the 1991 census report) were the worst affected by the reservation.
Critiques of Policies and Practices: The Case of Forests, Ethnic Communities and Tea Workers of Bangladesh, jointly authored by Philip Gain, Lucille Sircar and Shamimul Islam, endeavors to offer policy critiques in two areas, namely forests and indigenous peoples and tea plantation workers.
Of the two large articles of the book, the first one, "Polices and Practices Concerning Forests and Ethnic Communities of Bangladesh" by Philip Gain, shows us the politics of "Forest Department" and so-called "Forest Policies" formulated by different international agencies which often tend to curb or reduce the access of indigenous communities to their birth place, i.e., the forests. In the words of the author himself: "It is the governments, international financial institutions (IFIS) and companies, which are profiteers from plantations, try to establish that plantations are forests. They blame growing population, migration of landless people to the forestland, conversion of forestland to agriculture . . . for the destruction of forests. They deliberately make no mention of underlying factors that really ruin the forests and cause misery to the forest-dwelling indigenous communities."
The author then discusses the categories (reserved forests, protected forests, privately owned forests and unclassified state forests-USF) and types (hill forests, sal forests and mangrove forests) in Bangladesh. We come to learn that reserved forests include the Sundarbans (mangroves) in the southwest (601,700 hectares), the CHT region in the southeast (323,331 ha) and the Modhupur tracts in the north-central region (17,107 ha). Again, three-fourths of the CHT are unclassified state forests or USF.
Hill forests include tropical evergreen or semi-evergreen forests (640,000 hectares) in the eastern districts of Chittagong, Cox's Bazar, Sylhet and the CHT. But severe deforestation has taken place in the hill forests largely owing to dam, pulp and paper mills, woodlot and agro-forestry, rubber plantations, teak monoculture, cash crops, militarization, settlement, slash-and-burn cultivation, etc. According to Bangladesh Forest Industries Development Corporation (BFIDC) and other sources, about 9,000 ha of hilly land were distributed to 418 individual outsiders for commercial rubber plantation in Bandarban and Khagrachari Hill Districts.
The moist or dry deciduous sal forests (122,000 hectares) have been exhausted to a great extent because of cash crop plantation and plantation of other exotic species. According to some appalling statistics about the state of the Modhupur forest given by the Tangail forest office, out of 46,000 acres in the Tangail part of the Modhupur forest, around 7,800 acres have been given over to rubber cultivation, 1,000 acres to the air force, 25,000 acres have gone into illegal possession and the Forest Department controls only 9,000 acres (Published in World Rainforest Movement (WRM) Bulletin 75. Extracted from: "Modhupur: A stolen forest, robbed Adivasis," by Philip Gain).
Readers of the book will surely find the second article of the book, "The Case of Tea Workers in Bangladesh", by Lucille Sircar and Shamimul Islam with Philip Gain, to be more human interest oriented. The article begins with the "captive" situation of 87,534 registered and 20,065 non-registered tea workers in 160 tea estates of Bangladesh. Most of the 160 tea estates in Bangladesh are located in Maulvi Bazar, Hobiganj, Sylhet and Brahmanria districts. In 1854, when the tea workers (Santals, Oraons, Munda, Gonds, etc.) from different states of India first arrived, they each signed a four-year contract that eventually obliged them to stay on at the tea gardens for generations. Tea plantation was introduced by the British colonial lords mostly in Surmah Valley of Sylhet in 1854.
Although tea is an important export item in Bangladesh and in the fiscal year 2004, the country exported 12.3 million kilograms of tea valued at US$ 15.8 million, tea workers persist on their lives with the daily income as low as Tk. 28 (less than half of one US dollar) per day. They are in most cases denied of their rights to appropriate housing, medication, education and drinking water. Despite the provisions of the Tea Plantation Labor Rules 1977 that make it obligatory for the owners of tea gardens to provide standard housing to each tea worker, the housing status of the tea workers did not improve much over the decades.
Working conditions, particularly for women employees in tea gardens, are deplorable. Women are mostly employed as tea leaf pluckers because they have more "skilled and nimble fingers than men." 3 It is granted that a person plucks at least 23 kg leaves and gets 28 taka. If she or he fails to pluck that much the supervisor will not accept his or her attendance. But if one plucks more than that he or she gets an additional pay of only one taka per kg of tea leaves. Again, adolescents and children get only ninety and eighty percents of adults' wages. Parents often prefer sending their children to work in tea estates rather than to school because work brings extra cash for the family. Wednesday is the weekly payday.
Audity Falguni writes on and critiques development issues
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