Bangladesh

Yet another calamity

The death toll from Bangladesh's cyclone could reach 10,000

THE heinously overcrowded patch of delta that is Bangladesh found itself in a painful and familiar position on Monday November 19th. The country is struggling to cope with the aftermath of a natural calamity—in this case cyclonic winds that tore across the southern coastline four days before, killing several thousand people.

The government estimates that over 3,000 people have been killed, although many afflicted areas are still out of reach to rescuers. The Bangladeshi Red Crescent society predicts that the toll will climb above 10,000. The government also estimates that around 3m victims of the storm will need feeding and rehousing.

It could have been worse. Recent precautions against Bangladesh’s endemic tempests and floods—including storm shelters built along the coastline of the Bay of Bengal—are said to have saved many lives. The economic fallout would also have been much more calamitous if the strong winds had hit one of the country’s two main cities, Dhaka and Chittagong. The country’s deadliest cyclone to date, in 1970, whipped up a 20-foot wave that engulfed Chittagong. On that occasion, at least 300,000 people perished.

The latest calamity, called Cyclone Sidr, was modest by comparison though it generated winds of 150mph and a five-metre tidal surge. The country’s garment industry—which is responsible for three-quarters of total exports—was unaffected. But shrimp farming, another of the country’s biggest earners, has probably suffered badly. Early reports suggest that the storm also destroyed some 600,000 tonnes of rice. This must now be added to an existing shortfall of 1m tonnes, mainly caused by two bouts of unusually severe flooding earlier this year. Around 9m people were displaced at the time.

Perhaps only in Bangladesh—the original “basket case”, in Henry Kissinger’s scornful phrase—would the latest devastation be considered anything other than historic. The cyclone’s confirmed death toll is already much higher than that of Hurricane Katrina, a storm which killed over 1,800 in southern American in 2005, making it the deadliest natural disaster in that country’s history.

News agencies are reporting awful scenes in southern Bangladesh: bloated corpses bobbing in swollen rivers and flooded paddy-fields; whole villages washed into oblivion; and destitute people begging for clothes to enshroud their dead relatives.

World Vision, an aid agency, said that 1,000 fishermen had gone missing in the tempest. Military vessels and helicopters have been dispatched to scour islands and remote coastal areas of the Bay of Bengal for survivors. They include two American naval vessels.

Indeed, in a country mostly known for disasters and the poverty of its 150m people, donors are generally ready to respond to an emergency. Saudi Arabia, India, Britain, America and Germany have already pledged aid worth tens of millions of dollars. The UN World Food Programme says it has delivered food aid to 650,000 people so far. This includes bundles of biscuits, parachuted into areas still cut off by broken roads and flooding.

Also unlike Katrina, which created an occasion for Americans to deride an unpopular government, Cyclone Sidr may, at least in the short-term, do little damage to Bangladesh’s shaky administration. The army-backed interim government was installed after a general election was cancelled in January. The army, which has been careful to keep a low profile since, in effect, seizing power, tends to win deserving praise for its disaster-relief efforts.

Yet in the longer term, Bangladeshis’ latest suffering may give strength to a general feeling that democracy should be restored. Food-price inflation, at around 11%, is already the biggest grievance of most Bangladeshis. It could climb as a result of the destruction.

The government is partly to blame for this economic distress. It is pursuing an aggressive anti-corruption drive which, though laudable in principle, has created uncertainty in the economy, causing a worrisome drop in investment.

In any case

the restoration of democracy looks far-off. An election is scheduled for December next year. Yet with most of the leaders of the country’s two main political parties in jail, mostly on charges of corruption, it is hard to see who will contest it. It may well be postponed. All of which suggests that Bangladesh would be a hard case to govern, even with nature on its side.