Word: bangladesh
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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TROPICAL POVERTY is a very deceptive thing, very weird--tuberculosis under a clear blue sky, bodies eating themselves away in the midst of a lush countryside. When you fly over Bangladesh you have to wonder how a land so green could ever have a food problem. This is the richest and most fertile farmland in the world--nothing in Iowa or the Ukraine can compare to it. The whole country is a delta formed by two of the mightiest rivers in the world, the Ganges and the Brahmaputra. Since the Brahmaputra is essentially liquid topsoil and the Ganges flowing shit...
...however, it is rather hard to tell what's out of the ordinary in a nation where political assassinations occur at the rate of one thousand a year. Dozens of natives learn daily, at the cost of their lives, that it is very, very dangerous to assume you know Bangladesh...
...Bangladesh is, quite literally, a nation that no one knows. You can't even find out how many people live there: estimates run from seventy million to eighty five. Likewise, no one knows how fast the population is expanding: some will tell you three million a year, others will say less than two. This discrepancy is more than academic debate over statistics; each one of these chalkmarks in the census book represents a person who needs food, a home, clothes, medicine, schooling, work. If you're off by fifteen million and a human margin of error is increasing...
...children, suffer hunger and sickness, work hard, and die young. The Bengalis are by one estimate 95 percent illiterate, which puts them in the running for least educated people in the world. Although Central Africa has the distinction of being the world's most unhealthy region, health conditions in Bangladesh are none too good--the delta is the place where cholera and smallpox originated and is regularly stricken with diseases the West forgot about centuries ago, such as bubonic plague. A mother can expect at least two of her children to die (ever wonder why they have so many kids...
...then there are the utterly impoverished nations-countries like India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Ethiopia, Chad and Haiti. These constitute what is now being called the "Fourth World": countries with burgeoning populations, few natural resources and an undeveloped industrial base. According to World Bank President Robert McNamara, who will issue a grim survey of the world economy this week, there are some 900 million people in this Fourth World who subsist on incomes of less than $75 a year. "They are the absolute poor," said McNamara, "living in situations so deprived as to be below any rational definition of human decency...