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If you buy leather produced in Bangladesh, odds are it came from the these conditions. There comes a time when everyone has to make the decision as what they will accept and what they cannot accept. Then, they must decide whether they will act or ignore the situation. After you have finished viewing the videos and reading the blog, it is my sincere wish that each reader will refuse to buy Bangladeshi leather particularly Hazaribagh leather. Then, if the spirit is moved, letter, emails or phone calls to local leather shops letting them know that if they sell Bangladeshi leather, you will take your business elsewhere.
To contact the Bangladeshi government:
Prime Minister's Office
Old Sangsad Bhaban
Address: Tejgaon, Dhaka-1215
Bangladesh
E-mail: info@pmo.gov.bd (link is on right-hand side of page)
A new report from Human Rights Watch exposes the horrific environmental, health, and social conditions under which 90% of Bangladesh's leather is produced, in the Hazaribagh area of the nation's capital Dhaka.
You can watch the short video above to get the gist of the situation — which involves child labor, the government admitting it doesn't enforce the laws that are on the books, and pretty horribly working conditions all around — but here are some of the deeper details of the report:
Leather produced in Hazaribagh goes to 70 countries, but most of it ends up in China, South Korea, Japan, Italy, Germany, Spain and the US. For the past ten years Bangladesh's leather industry has grown by $41 million per year, with $663 million worth of leather produced in 2011-2012.
As far as the environmental impact goes, the report summary says:The wastewater that pours off tannery floors and into Hazaribagh’s open gutters and eventually Dhaka’s main river contains, among other substances, animal flesh, sulfuric acid, chromium, and lead. The government estimates that about 21,000 cubic meters of untreated effluent is released each day in Hazaribagh. Government officials and tannery industry representatives told Human Rights Watch that no Hazaribagh tannery has an effluent treatment plant to treat its waste, which can have many thousands of times the legally permitted concentrations of pollutants.
And the child labor/poor working conditions aspect:Human Rights Watch interviewed children, some as young as 11, working in tanneries. They were engaged in hazardous work, such as soaking hides in chemicals, cutting tanned hides with razorblades, and operating dangerous tanning machinery. Women and girls said that they are paid comparatively less than men and that, in addition to their own work, they must also perform tasks normally performed by men.
Read the full report: Toxic Tanneries: The Health Repercussions of Bangladesh's Hazaribagh Leather
And, of course, all of this is after the fact that the animals raised for leather probably had horrendous living conditions as well...
A brilliant video produced by a tourist to the country; and, what he sees in the tannery district.
Photo courtesy: foam/CC BY-SA 2.0
Pollution from traditional cookstoves in developing nations, both indoor air pollution and black carbon soot's climate pollution, is equally a serious health issue and a technically easy climate fix.
Simply replace older cookstoves with more efficient new models that function essentially similarly but burn fuel more efficiently, resulting in less smoke and soot, as well as use less fuel, that's the reasoning. The case has been made many times on TreeHugger, and major international aid programs are underway, investing millions of dollars to spread newer, cleaner technology.
But, if a new survey of Bangladeshi women, published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, is more widely applicable then there's a huge uphill climb ahead for proponents of the cleaner cookstove climate and health fix.
It seems that even though 94% of Bangladeshi women surveyed know that the cooking smoke is a serious health hazard indoors (remember it's overwhelmingly women exposed to the smoke), they'd prefer to stick with traditional stoves and spend money on other aspects of their lives.
If given the option of a new clean cookstove or a cash subsidy, they'd take the cash and spend it on "doctors, schools, electricity, clean water, latrines, seeds for planting, and structures to protect their land from flooding."
Currently 98% of Bangladeshis use traditional cookstoves, fueled by a mix of wood and agricultural waste, and dried animal dung. The smoke from these stoves causes 50,000 premature deaths annually, part of 2 million premature deaths worldwide attributed to indoor air pollution. Outside the home, the black carbon soot from these stoves (as well as from industrial sources and older diesel engines) is a significant component of global warming, as well as increasing the rate of glacier melting as the particles settle on the ice reducing its albedo.
The survey found that even when the clean cookstoves were offered at a 50% subsidy, the rate of adoption only increased 12% for ones which burned fuel more efficiently and 5% for ones with a chimney. At full price the adoption rate was a very meagre 2-5%.
At least in Bangladesh, the draw of electricity, clean water, and a latrine (let alone what we in the wealthy world would consider adequate plumbing) are far bigger draws than either the threat of health problems from indoor air pollution or climate change — both, in the moment, theoretical problems with the effects felt non-immediately.
Grappling with solutions ... villagers repair a vital flood-protecting embankment after Cyclone Aila struck in 2009. Photo courtesy: Munir Uz Zaman/AFP/Getty
Rebecca Sultan's life has been shattered twice in a few years. First, the 140mph winds of Cyclone Sidr ripped through her village, Gazipara, flattening houses, killing 6,000 people and devastating the lives of millions as it slammed into southern Bangladesh in 2007.
Then, 18 months later, as Sultan was recovering, Cyclone Aila tore in from the Bay of Bengal with torrential rains, breaching the coastal embankments and flooding her fields with salt water.
Storms of this intensity historically happen in Bangladesh once every 20 to 30 years. But two "super-cyclones" in two years, followed by a narrow escape when super-cyclone Nargis killed 100,000 people in nearby Burma a year later, convinced Sultan and her village, as well as many sceptics in government, that climate change was happening and Bangladesh's very survival was at stake.
Gazipara, like thousands of other villages in coastal Bangladesh, is now racing to adapt to the increased flooding, erosion and salt-water intrusion.
Sultan and 30 other women have raised their small houses and toilets several feet up on to earth plinths. Others are growing more salt-tolerant crops and fruit trees, and most families are trying different ways to grow vegetables. "We know we must live with climate change and are trying to adapt," said Sultan.
Elsewhere in Bangladesh, hundreds of communities are strengthening embankments, planting protective shelter belts, digging new ponds and wells and collecting fresh water. Some want to build bunkers to store their valuables, others want cyclone shelters.
"I am quite amazed at how people are grappling with climate change and are adapting," said Saleemul Huq, a Bangladeshi scientist who is head of the climate change group at the International Institute for Environment and Development in London and an adviser to the Bangladesh government on how to adapt to climate change.
"It's by far the most aware society on climate change in the world," Huq said. "It has seen the enemy and is arming itself to deal with it. The country is now on a war footing against climate change. They are grappling with solutions. They don't have them all yet but they will. I see Bangladesh as a pioneer. It has adapted more than any other country to the extremes of weather that climate change is expected to bring."
With the latest research showing more droughts in the country's north and rising sea levels, more than 30 million Bangladeshis are liable to lose everything from climate change in the next 30 to 50 years, said Atiq Rahman, director of the Bangladesh Centre for Advanced Studies and a lead author of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's fourth assessment report.
"It's extreme events, like super-cyclones and the droughts, that will dominate in future, not the mean [average]," Rahman said. "It's the extra days of heat or cold or the intensity of the cyclones that will affect life most. Poor people cannot wait for global leadership on climate change – they are acting now. They are paying with their own lives, their own resources, their own efforts. They cannot wait. It is not a question of choice."
The trouble, Rahman told a conference on community adaptation last week in Dhaka, is that traditional knowledge about when to plant which crops, or to harvest, may not be sufficient. "Government recognises it is a very real threat. But what happens in the future will not be indicated by what has happened in the past. There is a new knowledge challenge," he says.
"Many know to plant more tolerant crops in hard years, but lack the drought-tolerant or salt-resistant seeds now needed to deal with worsening conditions. We need new technologies, funds and knowledge."
But, said the foreign minister, Dipu Moni, rich countries had not given the money they had pledged to help Bangladesh and other vulnerable countries adapt. "Climate change is real and happening," Moni said. "A 1C rise in temperatures for Bangladesh equates to a 10% loss of GDP. One event like Sidr can take 10 to 20 years to recover from and cost us billions of dollars. But we don't see the money coming.
"The people being affected are not the big banks but the poor. Our plight goes quite unnoticed. It does not make the rich countries produce trillions of dollars overnight. It's a shame, but we keep trying."
According to her ministry, Bangladesh has received $125m (£78m) so far, including $75mfrom the Department for International Development (DfID). "But [countries] have refused to [say] if the climate change money is taken out of [the existing] aid basket," said a senior civil servant. "We want clear guarantees that this money will be on top of official development assistance money. DfID has not clarified this is additional to ODA."
On the coast, Sultan pondered the changes. "The difference we've all seen in the weather in just a few years is great. Now we are getting sudden rains, we don't know when to expect them; the water levels rise faster, the erosion is greater and we are getting more salinity. We used to know when the seasons would change; now they are temperamental. We are resilient and determined to adapt to whatever happens, but it is hard."
One of the first victims of our changing climate is Bangladesh. This low-lying delta is slowly sinking under the weight of the rising seas. There are already great areas of land in the coastal belt that are now under water. If the current climate changes are not reversed soon, much of Bangladesh could be swallowed up by the Bay of Bengal.
There are some very grim possibilities in Bangladesh’s future if the climate changes carry on abated. Within the next 50 years, 17% of Bangladesh’s landmass is certain to be lost to the bay leaving 30 million people homeless and looking for new places to live in a country that is already desperately overcrowded.
For those who live further inland, cyclones and floods will increase in frequency and intensity. Changes in temperature will mean intense torrents of rain followed contrastingly by periods of drought. It is possible that the entire monsoon cycle will collapse.
The Jamuna river is often called the “Jamuna braid”. It is called a “braid” because the river splits in estuaries and channels, joins together again repeatedly and forms a constantly changing landscape of land and water. The islands made of river silt (called chars) are strange-land formations that live in the regions between land and water. The Jamuna braid is home to most of Bangladesh’s chars. The people who live on the chars do so because with a population of 180 million people, every micro-inch of land must be utilized.
These chars have a lifespan of nine years before they are reclaimed by the water. Char dwellers are repeated victims of flooding and river erosion; but, amazingly have found a way to live in this landscape that is literally “here today and gone tomorrow”.
Chars are uninhabitable until they are few years old. Char dwellers tell the age of the islands by the wild plants that have become established on them. There are usually only enough chars surfaced and habitable for the people to have a home made from what they can collect: tin, cardboard, old pieces of wood. They have no place in which to plant crops so the men usually work as weavers or day labourers. They are the “hard-core poor”. They own absolutely nothing; and, have to deal repeatedly with the char disappearing back into the water before they have had a chance to evacuate it.
Many of you are asking, “This is tragic; but, Bangladesh is a long way from me. Why should I be concerned?” True, the effects that are ravishing Bangladesh may not be obviously visible to people in North America, Europe or other countries far from this poor third-world one; but, we must learn from what is happening or we shall be doomed to repeat it.
The world’s oceans are rising. The rise so far has been quite minimal compared to what could happen if both the polar ice caps melted and flooded our planet. Unfortunately for Bangladesh even though the water rising is minimal so far; they are so close to sea level that they have literally lost ground to the ocean. Bangladesh is simply not as large as it used to be. As the waters continue to rise, more coastal areas will be in danger. The United Kingdom is presently facing a loss of some of its coastal land and villages (more on that in another blog).
The water rises, the climate changes; the water rises more, the climate changes more; and so on and so on and so on. It is only a matter of time before everyone, everywhere is affected by this. We can’t all become char dwellers.
Keep encouraging your elected officials to make changes and make them now. Keep reducing your carbon footprint and encourage others to do the same. United, we can make a difference.
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