Flood waters swamped Gabura in Bangladesh after Cyclone Aila hit. Photo by EPA/Abir Abdullah
When Cyclone Aila hit the coast of Bangladesh on Monday, reportedly killing at least 89 people, one of the first things I thought about was the 400 storm-resistant homes Oxfam helped to build following another devastating cyclone one and a half years ago. Did the houses hold up? Read the rest of this entry »
Woré Gana Seck at a speaking event in Kansas City, Missouri. Photo: Liliana Rodriguez / Oxfam America
It was Woré Gana Seck who first told me about what she called the “climate refugees.”
Last fall I traveled with Seck, executive director of Green Senegal, on a US speaking tour about the effects of climate change on poor communities. At venues across the American Midwest, Seck told the stories of families split apart by drought and crop failure, of teenagers lost at sea while attempting dangerous ocean crossings. She talked about a certain cemetery in Spain–the “Cemetery of the Unknown People”–filled with West Africans who had fled their homelands seeking a better way to earn a living.
I thought of Seck last week when I read Lisa Friedman’s article Coming Soon: Mass Migrations Spurred by Climate Change. Friedman interviews a married couple in Haringar, Bangladesh, who are the last remaining members of their family in their village; everyone else has fled to India, unable to catch enough fish to earn a living because of increasingly severe cyclones and floods. One by one, Friedman says, small migrations like these are “changing the face of the world”:
Maleka Khatun sits in the doorway of her home near Kurigam, Bangladesh. Though Khatun said she completed her cooking an hour ago, there was too little left for her after her husband and children had eaten. She feared that this might be her family’s only meal that day. Photo: Oxfam
OK, so you know the global food crisis is affecting millions. But did you know that the crisis affects women even more than men?
That’s the subject of a recent brief by the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI), Helping Women Respond to the Global Food Price Crisis. According to IFPRI,
Higher food prices increase the burden for women, who must stretch the limited food budget even further. Women often end up being the shock absorbers of household food security, reducing their own consumption to leave more food for other household members. In Bangladesh, even before the crisis, almost 60 percent of households reported that women skip meals more often than men.
As food prices rise and staples consume more of the food expenditures, households frequently cut back on both food quantity (caloric intake) and quality (dietary diversity), which provides micronutrients that girls and women particularly need…
Jamil Hamzah walks through rice fields in Gampang Ladang, Indonesia, where Oxfam helped farmers purchase rice paddy seed. According to a new UN report, Indonesia is one of just seven countries where 65 percent of the world’s hungry people live. Photo: Jim Holmes/Oxfam
Each day, the epidemic is spreading further across the globe, extending its tendrils into every nation on earth. It strikes women and children first, as well as the poorest among us. Nearly 1 billion people are already affected, and this year alone, an additional 40 million more suffered its symptoms: fatigue, dizziness, extreme weakness, even death.
The thing is, you don’t read much about this epidemic in the headlines these days. No one’s handing out ribbons or marching for a cure. Though it’s treatable, people aren’t doing much to prevent it. In fact, hardly anyone seems to be paying attention.
Sitting and shading ourselves from the sun on a 100-plus degree afternoon, my Oxfam colleagues and I learned from a group of local women about life on Char Shaper, the Bangla name for Snake Island. The sandy island sits in the middle of the Brahmaputra River, also called the Jamuna, which in April meanders as gently as the Charles River in Boston.
But in July, things change dramatically with this river as it fills with snow melt from the Himalayas. Families have to pack up their belongings and head to higher ground before the flood water envelops them. As many as a million people live on islands like this one. They are among the country’s poorest citizens, eking out a living by catching small river fish and planting groundnuts, chilies, and corn. Read the rest of this entry »
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