The Environment and Economic Development in South Asia: An Overview Concentrating on Bangladesh

Citation

Shakur, S. (2000), "The Environment and Economic Development in South Asia: An Overview Concentrating on Bangladesh", International Journal of Social Economics, Vol. 27 No. 2, pp. 160-168. https://doi.org/10.1108/ijse.2000.27.2.160.2

Economic development and a liveable environment are both needed for improved human wellbeing. Neglect of either goal by policy makers could impair the other. Environmental degradation leads to reduced capacity to sustain economic development. Likewise, a rapidly expanding population requires economic development, including economic growth and technological improvements.

Despite such a complementary relationship, until very recently research interests in economic development and environmental economics have developed independent of each other. Linkages between development strategies and their environmental implications are still poorly understood. Generalisations about whether the net environmental effects from rapid growth will be positive or negative are usually too simplistic to be much use for policymaking. The actual effects depend on the specific context, including different nations’ capabilities to implement effective environmental protection regimes. The growing potential for development‐environment conflicts suggests that these two areas need to be researched jointly. Alauddin and Tisdell accomplish this in their book, which is reviewed here. By concentrating on South Asia, and prudent use of micro data from villages in Bangladesh, the authors are able to pin down the interaction between development process and environmental degradation; by doing so they provide valuable insights to decision makers.

In a country like Bangladesh, where the majority of the population is engaged in subsistence farming in rural areas, economic development is synonymous with agricultural development. Not surprisingly, the authors have devoted a large section of the book to the interface between agricultural production, rural employment and their sustainability. The effect of the green revolution has been mixed. Introduction of high yielding varieties (HYV) of rice and associated technology is credited with feeding an ever‐expanding population of Bangladesh. The environmental damages done in the process will probably carry into the future. As the authors noted, a 50 to 200 per cent higher return on capital compared to labour (p. 85) encouraged an inappropriate choice of inputs (like chemical fertilisers and modern irrigation methods rather than Bangladesh’s abundant labour). At the same time, regression results from three ecologically different sample villages demonstrate significant positive association between technology and intensity of labour use (p. 91). This should help employment generation. Income rose through exchange of the marketable surplus.

While this sounds positive, the problem lies in the sustainability of higher employment and yield achieved by such processes. The authors used three proxies to represent new agricultural technology: proportion of irrigated area, HYV planted area, and chemical fertilisers used per hectare. None of these is known to be environmentally friendly. Higher doses of chemical fertilisers are responsible for creating conditions where the natural nutrients of the soil are fast depleting. The problem is accentuated by a lack of crop rotation practice in arable lands. Free use of underground aquifers is attributed to a whopping 60‐fold increase in the area irrigated by under‐ground water in less than 25 years (p. 40). Similarly, overuse of surface water for irrigation purposes has resulted in depleted fish stock, navigable waterways and wetland ecosystems. The authors correctly blame such unsustainable use of a common property resource on the lack of a “suitable pricing scheme”. In terms of a solution, the authors coyly note that “politically this may be difficult and agency costs have to be taken into account”. Specific recommendations would have been desirable at this point.

The book, however briefly, does refer to the political solution to the transboundary aspect of water management (section 11.5, p. 196). The largest river in the sub‐continent, the Ganges, rises in Nepal and flows 2,240 kilometres through three densely populated Indian states. After half a century of bitter rivalry over access to its waters, India and Bangladesh signed a 30‐year water‐sharing agreement in December 1996. The agreement, when implemented, will provide Bangladesh with a guaranteed minimum amount of water during the three driest months of March, April, and May. The new treaty sets ten‐day periods during these three months when India and Bangladesh will alternately have access to an agreed‐upon amount of the water reaching the Farakka Barrage, a huge dam built upstream in India. Public reaction to the signing of the treaty has been mixed. Despite such stipulation, the agreement over such a contentious issue demonstrates that political solutions are not completely infeasible.

An assertion is made that modern agricultural methods developed for temperate areas are not environmentally suitable for tropical countries like Bangladesh (p. 97). While such allegations are frequently and quite appropriately made in terms of relative resource endowments, the distinction is less obvious in the current environmental context. One may argue that the same environmental problems (for example declining soil fertility, loss of biodiversity, and resistance to pests) persist in temperate countries as well as their tropical counterparts. These environmental damages result from adoption of particular production practices (like HYV, irrigation, chemical fertiliser and pesticide), irrespective of the particular climatic conditions. One obvious difference is in the income level, where temperate climate countries are typically richer and hence have resources to promote sustainable practices. Increasingly, temperate countries in Europe and North America are instituting “de‐coupled” programmes (away from agricultural production) and farmers are viewed as custodians of the natural environment, rather than providers of food. While such shifts are neither feasible nor desirable in current Lesser Developed Countries, it strengthens the notion that raising rural income is important because sustainability includes economic sustainability. The authors’ belief in the inseparability of the two, that of environmental and economic sustainability, is evidenced throughout the book, and I commend them for holding such a view.

Chapter 9 in the book portrays the devastating environmental impact of a relatively new entrant in Bangladesh’s primary sector, that of shrimp aquaculture. The government encouraged shrimp cultivation in ecologically sensitive coastal areas. Already shrimps account for 80 per cent of Bangladesh’s fish exports. Although it is difficult for a cash‐strapped economy like Bangladesh to retract from such a lucrative sector, the authors justifiably point to a much lower economic value or worth of this trade, given their better definitions. Increased salinity, declining rice yields, vulnerability to tidal waves from clearing of mangroves, effluent dumping and loss of biodiversity are noted as some of the many costs of shrimp farming. A similar outcome is observable in some neighbouring countries, especially Thailand. The trade‐off is a difficult one between rice farming, the staple food of Bangladeshi people, and shrimp farming, a major foreign exchange earner, and should be analysed in the light of their respective impacts on the sustainability of rural communities and their livelihoods, rather than on current cash values.

As mentioned earlier, the emphasis of the book is on agriculture and rural communities, but there is a reasonable section devoted to the state of Bangladesh’s energy resources and the emerging urban sector (chapters 10 and 11 respectively). Whenever appropriate, a comparison is drawn with the experiences of other South and South‐east Asian countries. This makes the investigation of the environment‐development‐poverty nexus, the central thesis of the book, quite comprehensive.

Some concluding comments in chapter 11 refer to Kuznet’s hypothesis, which essentially states that environmental degradation initially rises with economic development, but then falls as economies mature. The authors promptly point out the danger of emulating the economic paths of currently affluent economies, as it is possible that poor countries will plunder environmental resources and remain poor, in a low equilibrium trap. This should convince anyone of the role of a sound environmental/resource management policy. But Bangladesh does not actually lack such a policy. For example, the Bangladesh Environment Conservation Act (1995) defines the environment to include “water, air, land and physical properties and the inter‐relationship which exists among and between them and human beings, other living beings, plants and micro organisms” (Section 2c), and then makes specific provisions for their enhancement. It is the poor environmental governance, ill‐defined property rights and widespread corruption that have led to the current disarray. The challenge of a sustainable economic development that Bangladesh faces is complex. The authors have done an excellent job in untangling the intricacies of the current situation in Bangladesh that should provide a valuable lesson for other countries in the region.