By Joydeep Gupta
Bali, Dec 12 (IANS) Bangladeshi poet Javed Haider once wrote the famous lines: “Give me rice, or I’ll eat up your map”. Akter Banu brought that home to delegates at the UN climate change conference here as only a direct victim of global warming can.
Banu lives in a village called Char Bhadrapur in Pabna district of Bangladesh. She lives in a hut – now more and more often on top of that hut – as repeated floods in the river Jamuna bring the water up to her rafters. She is well on her way to becoming a climate refugee.
“We live in water for six months every year,” Banu said at a meet organised by the Bangladesh branch of the international NGO ActionAid. “At no time are we sure where we will be the next day.
“We live among the farmers. We cannot go out to work because there is no work nearby. When the floods come, those who have relatives in town move there. The rest of us – we just sit on our rooftops, day after day, without any food or water.
“This year the floods came twice. What do we cook? The rice is all wet. Some children in the village have died of hunger or by drinking dirty water. Some cattle drowned. Some goats drowned. What do we do?
“At least earlier, there used to be fertile land left behind after the floods, where we could grow a crop. This year the land left behind is sandy. We can’t grow anything on that. Even when there’s no flood, the river is eroding our farmland all the time. It didn’t do so earlier.
“We’ve lost our entire crop (of pulses) in the second flood this year.
“We’re poor, but we’re human. What can we do? There is no government institution, no doctor, no one to treat our children when they fall ill. We can send the children to school only six months in a year,” Banu said.
“No one is helping us. So we’ll have to move. We don’t know where we’ll go. But wherever that is, we want a school there, a hospital, some way in which we can earn a living.
“There are floods every year now. We can’t live like this. Move us elsewhere,” she said during the UN conference on climate change being held Dec 3-14.
Farah Kabir, country director of ActionAid Bangladesh, said: “Unless the world recognises that climate change is a women’s issue, poor women will continue to pay the price. Women need to be given their rightful say in how adaptation funds are spent so they can ensure that their families make the necessary changes to survive climate change.”
(Joydeep Gupta can be contacted at [email protected])