“A woman one of the most beautiful creation of GOD, showering her respect as daughter, feel her care in the form of a sister, feel her warmth in the form of a friend.
Now we come to know why did God create man 1st before creating a woman ? Of course, because its alawys gud to make a rough draft 1st before making a MASTERPIECE..”

http://www.glamnglory.com/

 The government of Japan has donated 27,465 tonnes of wheat to Bangladesh to help stiffen relief infrastructure in a nation vulnerable to natural disasters, the Japanese embassy said on Monday.

“The food assistance will be provided through the United Nations World Food Programme (WFP) to assist 300,000 ultra-poor people of the country to reduce disaster risk through building community infrastructure,” it said.

The consignment was handed to the food and disaster management ministry.

“We hope this Japanese contribution will help to improve household- and community-based infrastructure, minimising the negative impact of natural hazards”, the statement said.

The government of Japan has been one of the key donors to WFP-supported programmes in Bangladesh, giving approximately $20 million since 2007.
Donors support a
number of targete  food-based programmes in Bangladesh that are widely
credited with providing poor people access to food and improving their food
security. However, inefficiency in the food distribution system may be hindering
the realization of the full benefits of these programmes. The International Food
Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) conducted a comprehensive study of the
efficiency of food distribution in food aid-supported programmes in Bangladesh.
The capacity and efficiency of the food distribution system was assessed from
entry ports to targeted beneficiaries. The study identified problems in the
whole food distribution system, determined the level of losses, leakages,

and other lapses at various

Related :

The government wants to ensure sufficient rice supply in the market, Food Minister Abdur Razzak told reporters after the meeting, adding that the government is also considering a proposal to soon import 5 million metric tons of rice.

The Singapore-based Indo-Sino Trade Pte Ltd has won a deal to supply 25,000 tonnes of white rice from Myanmar at $395 per tonne to Bangladesh, officials from the country said on Sunday.

The firm was the lowest bidder at a tender closed on Feb. 8, to supply the rice within 60 days of signing the deal, which will be inked soon.

The firm offered 25,000 tonnes in the tender that sought to buy 50,000 tonnes of the cargo and bidders were allowed to offer a minimum quantity of 10,000 tonnes.

The deal for the remaining 25,000 tonnes will be issued soon with a separate firm after fixing the price.

Food Ministry issued another tender late last month to buy another 50,000 tonnes of white rice to shore up stocks for keeping prices stable in the local market. [nLDE61M0AV]

The new tender was closed on Sunday, but results would be announced later, officials said.

Bangladesh, which imports around 2 million tonnes of wheat annually, has a plan to import 300,000 tonnes of rice this fiscal year to June.

The country, also issued a series of international tenders recently to buy wheat and so far imported 100,000 tonnes of wheat and signed deals to buy 380,000 tonnes more in the current fiscal year.

Bangladesh produces over 30 million tonnes of rice, the staple, sufficient to feed its more than 150 million people,

Realated :

Tea garden sand is agricultural sand which gives us a great amount of economy help in Bangladesh. But some people are using this sand for buildings, multistoried buildings for mitigating the housing demand. Developer developing their business but they are destroying Bangladesh economy. This can create a great disaster in Bangladesh economy tea export business.

 Land Minister Mohammad Rezaul Karim Hira yesterday strictly directed the owners of the tea gardens not to extract sand from inside and adjoining areas of the gardens and stop selling saplings.

“The lease holders of the tea gardens are unlawfully extracting sand and cutting hill trees in an unplanned manner,” he said as the chief guest while inaugurating training workshop of farmers on ‘Modern method to cultivate soybean’ at regional agriculture preservation centre of Bangladesh Agriculture Research Institute (BARI) in Jamalpur.

Dr Mohammad Ehsanul Haque, Director of BARI, presided over the program.

The Land Minister stressed on preserving of agriculture lands. He said that non-agriculture land could be used for building multistoried buildings for mitigating the housing demand.

“It is possible to attain food autarky and fulfillment of nutrition by giving proper training to farmers to produce high bred food,” he said.

He blamed the Chhatra Shibir for unleashing a reign of terror in the educational institutions.

People have to think about it that the land which will give us gold in future that we are destroying in present. Further there will not be any tea garden if this is going on & on.

Regarding climate change
Bangladesh has voiced strong opposition to plans by the UK Department for International Development (DFID) to provide close to US$100 million in climate change aid – because of its delivery through the World Bank.

“We are strongly against the World Bank’s involvement in handling the climate fund. DFID should give the money straight to the Bangladesh government rather than giving it to the World Bank to disburse it,” Food and Disaster Management Minister Abdur Razzaque told IRIN on 16 February.

“It should be a country-led programme rather than a World Bank-led one,” he said, adding that there were expectations the Bank would attach “unacceptable strings and conditions to its programme”.

His comments come one day after 21 civil society organizations, including campaigners from the European Action Group on Climate Change Bangladesh, the World Development Movement (WDM) and the Jubilee Debt Campaign, protested against the UK decision outside the DFID office in Dhaka.

They insisted that DFID withdraw all conditions on the $94 million grant being offered to Bangladesh to cope with the impact of climate change. 

DFID should give the money straight to the Bangladesh government rather than giving it to the World Bank to disburse it.

But

the British High Commission in Dhaka said how the funds were given out was not an issue.

“The issue of involvement of the World Bank in disbursing the money is a minor issue as the government of Bangladesh shall have full control of the fund,” Nazneen Ferdousi, senior press officer for the British High Commission in Dhaka, told IRIN.

The World Bank, as a development partner, would only provide administrative support in handling the funds, she said. 

“We don’t see any problem in it,” she said.

When contacted, World Bank officials referred IRIN to DFID.

Within the next 50 years, over 20 million people could be displaced and become “climate change refugees”, if sea and salinity levels rise in Bangladesh, according to the government’s 2009 Bangladesh Climate Change Strategy and Action Plan.

Speaking at the opening of a two-day Bangladesh development meeting on 15 February, Bangladesh Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina called on donor countries to speed up delivery of promised funds to help mitigate the effects of climate change.

World leaders pledged $30 billion from 2010 to 2012 at the December climate change summit in Copenhagen to help least developed countries (LDCs) most vulnerable to climate change, particularly low-lying coastal countries like Bangladesh. There is a complex range of climate change adaptation funding mechanisms, reviewed by IRIN here: http://www.irinnews.org/Report.aspx?ReportId=88070.

Bangladesh says it is entitled to ask for at least 15 percent of the climate adaptation fund pledged in Copenhagen.

Donors in attendance in Dhaka included the USA, European Union, the World Bank and the Asian Development Bank. The meeting is to review Bangladesh’s development programmes, including plans to reduce poverty, and help donors select areas of cooperation.

 We are too weak to nature, nature loves us and give life. Sometime rude !! 

www.theecologist.org According to an Ecologist investigation, UK companies are among those using loopholes in European and international law to sell ships to Bangladesh scrap yards with little or no safety regulations. The ship breaking industry is booming in Southern Bangladesh but NGOs say workers are frequently exposed to toxins and that at least one worker dies every week from explosions or falling steel plates. UK based Andrew Weir Shipping Limited is one of a number of companies whose vessels have ended up on the beaches of Bangladesh in the past year. The company has sold four ships through a cash intermediary in China and at least one of them ended up in the notorious ‘Lucky Shipyard’ where children as young as 12 dismantle ships without safety equipment. Two other UK companies, Zodiac Maritime Agencies and FGM Shipping Management Limited are both alleged by the French NGO Robin des Bois to have sold ships for scrapping in Bangladesh in the last year. Under the Basel Convention, any ship containing hazardous substances cannot be sent for disposal in a developing country without extensive pre cleaning. However, these rules can be bypassed in two ways. Firstly owners can wait till the ships are in international waters before declaring their intention to scrap the vessel, where the Convention does not apply. Secondly, the ships can fly the flags of countries that are not party to the convention such as Antigua and Barbuda. According to the NGO Platform on Ship Breaking, two thirds of the world’s vessels are sailing under so called flags of convenience belonging to small states that compete by promising to keep taxes, fees and regulations light for ship owners. There is no implication that workers have been killed or injured dismantling ships owned by UK companies. But when contacted, Andrew Weir Shipping Limited refused to confirm whether its ships had been cleaned of hazardous substances before arriving in Bangladesh. Zodiac Maritime Agencies confirmed it had sent a ship to Bangladesh but could not provide proof that it had been cleaned of hazardous waste. FGM Shipping Management Limited did not comment on the allegations.

Globalization Batters Bangladesh
Are the global problems of grinding poverty, illiteracy and hunger faced by a majority of the world’s population a mere accident of history? Is the enormous inequality and underdevelopment of the formerly colonized countries of Africa and Asia due solely to the crimes of conquest by European colonial powers 100 and 200 years ago?

Or does U.S. imperialism and modern finance capital in the drive to maximize profits bear the greatest responsibility for continuing and actually intensifying this historic inequality?

These are the questions that were discussed again and again during a visit to Bangladesh to attend the convention of the Socialist Party of Bangladesh as 2009 ended.

Following the party’s dynamic convention in Dhaka, the Socialist Party of Bangladesh made every effort to introduce the international delegates to as much of the struggle around the country as possible.

The SPB-arranged trip was accompanied by party General Secretary Khalequzzaman and several other party leaders from the capital, Dhaka, a densely populated city of 14 million, to Chittagong, the industrial port — a city of 4 million. The U.S. military continues to pressure Bangladesh to grant port facilities and landing rights at this strategic seaport on the Bay of Bengal.

After attending a rally of about 1,000 people in Chittagong, the international group traveled to the southernmost tip of Bangladesh in the Bay of Bengal, then to the border of Myanmar, and to an island off the southern tip, where the U.S. is also pressing for a base. Then it proceeded to the east of Dhaka to the tea and rubber plantations of the hills in the Syhlet district. Delegates had the unique opportunity to attend organizing meetings of tea and rubber workers and to meet with activists working to organize garment workers and rickshaw drivers.

The trip was an opportunity to see how the imperialist countries enforce the serious underdevelopment of Bangladesh despite the enormous resources and potential of the country. Delegates were also able to observe the organizing efforts of the party in major cities and rural areas.

Roads were often single lanes of blacktop clogged with old trucks, dangerously overcrowded buses and countless rickshaws. Bicycle rickshaws propelled by human labor provide most transport for people and materials even in the capital, where there are more than 1 million rickshaw drivers in motion almost round the clock. It is a brutal job with no security.

Lowest pay in the world

Lining the roads of Dhaka are thousands of garment sweatshops, easily identified by the rows of fluorescent lights glowing inside. In the near dark of early morning, millions of garment workers, primarily young women, rush to arrive on time for 12-hour work shifts. It is dark again as they leave.

The pay in Bangladesh for garment workers is the lowest in the world. Garment workers in India, Vietnam and Thailand now earn an average of $60 a month, a desperately low wage. But in the capitalist race to maximize profits on a global scale Bangladesh now has the largest garment industry in Asia — workers are paid only $20 per month with no benefits and no job security.

Large retail trading companies in the U.S. and Western Europe give most of the orders for Bangladeshi garment products. A handful of Western banks control the capital funds. The garment industry has been a main source of foreign exchange in Bangladesh for the last 25 years. Women garment workers are now trying to organize for higher pay and improved working conditions.

Chittagong’s ship-breaking yards

The ship-breaking yards of Chittagong service another industry that reflects a globalized market’s ruthless exploitation of low wages in Bangladesh. The shipping industry is the backbone of international trade. It is also the source of major environmental toxins.

The SPB arranged to get a few delegates into the internationally notorious yards, along with video cameras. There had been a deadly explosion in one of the yards the day before the international delegates arrived in Bangladesh. Security in all the yards was tight.

At high tide a spent vessel is driven onto the beach. It is then pulled apart by thousands of workers laboring with bare hands or using acetylene torch cutters to break huge carriers down into small pieces. Workers wear no helmets, gloves, goggles, restraining harnesses or even shoes.

This inferno of fumes and toxic chemicals creates hellish working conditions. Asbestos, lead, chromates, mercury, metal shards, radiation, noise, intense vibration, and welding and cutting fumes all mix together.

The industry is subject to no environmental laws and no health or safety requirements. No statistics are kept of accidents.

This toxic industry could not exist without the active complicity of the largest shipping conglomerates. Hundreds of ships from cargo vessels, bulk carriers, fish factories to super tankers ride at anchor in the sea waiting to be scrapped at over 70 ship-breaking yards.

Previously ships could be scrapped in two weeks in a modern shipyard using union labor in Britain, Japan, Germany, the U.S. or other countries where ships used to be built. In the last 25 years of the globalized labor market, all this has changed. Breaking up one ship now takes over six months on a beach with unskilled labor. This is now a cheaper way to recycle parts of an aging ship. Thousands of small shops, each selling a few recycled electronic or metal pieces of salvage, line the roads to the ship-breaking yards.

Ever since International Monetary Fund bankers denied credits and forced Bangladesh to shutter its steel plants, Bangladesh depends on ship breaking to meet its domestic steel requirements.

China once had a major ship-breaking industry. But as soon as China began enforcing environmental and safety laws, this dangerous industry became unprofitable there. In international shipping there is a race to find countries where no occupational health and safety standards are enforced and where wages are the lowest — a race to the bottom.

Tea and rubber workers organize

A major cash crop in Bangladesh, tea is bought and sold on the world market by a handful of large corporations. The tea pickers are mainly women and children. Men do the pruning, cutting and road work.

A high moment of the trip was attending a night meeting of hundreds of workers on an isolated tea plantation in the Syhlet district. Their very moving meeting was a vibrant mix of music, chants and talks of labor conditions. Based on their organizing, the workers at several plantations had finally won a 50 percent pay increase from $10 a month to $15 a month. They were determined to win their demands for schools for their children and basic health care.

Ratan Rajequzzaman, a leader of the Socialist Workers Front, explained in depth about both working conditions and organizing efforts.

British colonial plantation owners had imported tea workers from southern India more than 150 years ago. These workers have lived in both cultural and linguistic isolation ever since. They work under conditions of modern-day indentured slaves and depend totally on management for food and all basic necessities. These workers, who are victims of the greatest abuse and discrimination, seldom leave these extensive plantations.

Tea and rubber plantations are often combined, with tea bushes on one side of the road and rubber trees on the other. Tea plantations are idyllically called “tea gardens.” Picnicking in a tea garden is a popular tourist attraction for middle-class and returning Bangladesh immigrants. But picturesque photos of women bending and stooping to pluck tea leaves can hardly convey this backbreaking work or show that there is no protection from dangerous fertilizers and pesticides.

Archaic equipment for drying, shredding and bagging tea leaves exposes an industry that has changed little in decades. But now the old relations are being challenged with new energy.

Challenging the theft of resources

Along with its focus on labor organizing, the SPB has helped in organizing broad coalitions to challenge the grossly unequal contracts presented by such multinational oil corporations as Chevron, Shell and Conoco for development of Bangladesh’s gas, oil and coal resources. The oil giants are demanding contracts of between 6 and 21 percent royalties after exploration costs are met.

On Jan. 12, the final day of the visit, Michael Kramer, representing the International Action Center, was able to participate in human-chain demonstrations challenging these outrageous leases that were organized across the country by the National Committee to Protect Oil-Gas-Natural Resources. (The coalition has also opposed open-pit coal mining, which has resulted in destruction of wide areas of arable lands, water reservoirs and fish ponds.) The human chain was formed at 150 points along the cross-country line from Teknaf, the southernmost city, to Tentulia in the north.

Past challenges to unequal and secret leasing of national resources have led to important victories. A long march from Dhaka to Chittagong led to the cancellation of a 199-year lease of the country’s main seaport to a U.S. company.

In Bangladesh despite its enormous problems, made much worse by the global capitalist market, there are revolutionary forces who are confident that, with socialist planning and the creative involvement of the most oppressed and lowest paid workers in the world, the challenges to develop their rich resources are solvable in ways that will benefit the whole population.