Word: bengalis
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Like most of the peoples in the new breed of basket case nation-states, Bengalis live close to the soil, love and have many 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...
...VERY FEW BENGALIS eat as much as Westerners--in the whole country, probably less than one hundred thousand--but on the other hand the extent of starvation is almost certainly exaggerated. We get our "facts" on malnutrition from the Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO), a highly political body which would be out of work if its own figures didn't conclusively prove the world was on the brink of famine. By fooling around with their definitions one can 'prove' that anywhere from sixty all the way down to a mere fifteen percent of the Bengali population is underfed (fifteen...
...being produced; two age old social constraints, however, prevent it from getting into hungry mouths. The first is the income distribution. Rich people always use more food than they have to, especially in places where fat is a status symbol. Every pound of meat an American peace corpsman or Bengali professor buys takes seven pounds of grain off the market. This, of course, pushes the poorest of the poor below subsistence, towards death. With an equal income distribution, Bangladesh's food needs could be thirty per cent less than they are today. Even today, however, everyone might be well...
WESTERNERS criticize the Bengali government beauracracy for its slowness, ineptitude, and inefficiency; in themselves, these criticisms are proof Westerners do not understand Bangladesh's government. The point of the government, as has been the point of government in South Asia for at least a thousand years, is to enrich government officials and strengthen the power of the upper castes over the lower, and at this the government is remarkably adroit, efficient, and swift. There are very few construction projects, for example, from which officials fail to achieve their target of bribes, very few internal disturbances from which the peasants gain...
...light of this most recent Bengali revolution, it is this ugly side of the Bengali nature, this love for firsthand violence, coupled with their feeling toward their government, which makes things look bleak for the future. The only way the nation can feed 300 million people (a population it may well have in a generation or two) is by organizing an effective national development program. But such a program can't be organized because no one trusts the government (with good reason) or wants to work with it. If no one works with it, present inequalities will stay...