Compiled by Ed Shepherd

Bangladesh straddles the Tropic of Cancer between Burma and India, 390 miles (625 km) north to south by 190 miles (305 km) east to west. The capital is Dhaka.

Over 90 percent of the land is flat with many lakes and waterways that empty into the Bay of Bengal through a huge delta that is mainly less than nine metres above sea level.

Low altitude results in regular floods of hundreds of square miles during the monsoons (June - October) when 75 percent of annual rain falls. The worst floods of the 20th century occurred in 1998. About 60 percent of the land was flooded, more than 1,000 people died, and more than 30 million people became homeless. The road between Dhaka and major port, Chittagong, was flooded for over four weeks. With the rice crop ruined, over two million tons of grain were imported.
Since the 18th century, over a million people drowned; 815,000 of them in three storms in 1737, 1876, and 1970.

The Karnaphuli dam at Kaptai in the southeastern Chittagong highlands supplies most of the country’s hydroelectricity.
Over 66 percent of the land is arable; 20 percent is irrigated; 17 percent is forest.

History
Europeans visited Bengal from the late 16th century. After the British East India Company set up an outpost in Bengal in 1651, the Company and its private army gradually usurped the authority of India’s Mughal dynasty, which did not nominally lose power until 1858.

Bribery was a British colonial military strategy. 1757 marked the beginning of British rule in India at the Battle of Plassey, Company army commander Robert Clive (‘Conqueror of India’) defeated the ruler of Bengal, largely by bribing soldiers, and replaced him with a puppet.

In 1947 East and West Pakistan gained independence from the British and from India.

East Pakistan’s living standards and economic development never caught up with West Pakistan. Then in 1970 West Pakistan refused to convene the National Assembly under the democratically elected Awami League Party, which led a violent campaign for independence from West Pakistan. Partition finally evolved along religious lines with 10 million Bengali refugees (mostly Hindus) fleeing to India, which sent in troops to rout West Pakistan’s army. East Pakistan declared independence in 1971.

The Awami League formed the first constitutional government of Bangladesh in 1972. However creating a new country did not improve social, economic, or political conditions; poverty continued to dominate society. Bangladesh is still a superficial democracy, being effectively under military control.
In 1975 General Ziaur Rahman succeeded in a political coup, suspended the constitution, and redirected economic development towards the export-led model, with privatisations and backing for private enterprise.

A second coup in 1982 led to four years of martial law under General Ershad who maintained neoliberal economic policies and blatant cronyism. 1986 elections ended in government collapse in 1987 amid social unrest.

Ershad was ousted by popular discontent in 1990, and replaced by the right-wing Bangladesh National Party’s (BNP) Begum Khaleda Zia (General Ziaur’s widow) in Bangladesh’s first free election since 1972. This regime implemented World Bank and International Monetary Fund demands (called ‘conditionalities’) to accelerate deregulation and privatisation with increased foreign access to the economy; government policy switched from regulation to ‘support’ of industry.

Investment, especially in garment production, then began to flow from the West, Taiwan, South Korea, Hong Kong, and China, whose garment production quotas under the Multi Fibre Arrangement (MFA - see below) were full, but which used Bangladesh as a base as it was quota-free due to United Nations’ (UN) classification as a ‘least developed country’.

The people
98 percent of the population are Bengalis. Over 80 percent of the population are Sunni Muslims, and about 10 percent are Hindus. Largely Buddhists, tribal peoples live in the southeastern Chittagong Hill Tracts. English is widely spoken in cities and among the educated.

There is a high population growth rate; nearly one half of the population is under 15 years old. Birth and death rates are very high. The 1951 population of 42 million had risen to over 100 million by the 1990s, despite massive migration to India. Population density averages 1,900 people per square mile (ppsm); the highest density, over 2,800 ppsm, is in and around Dhaka; lowest population density, about 100 ppsm in the Chittagong hills.

Over 85 percent of the population practices Islam, which was made the state religion in 1988. Most Muslims are of the Sunni sect, but a few are Shi’ites.

Most homes consist of several generations. Relatives arrange marriages; dowries are less common these days. Muslims may divorce; Hindus cannot, but they can be legally separated. Muslim law permits limited polygamy.

Rice, pulses, and fish are staples, but rice has been under-produced since 1947; wheat products are now eaten instead. Goat and beef is eaten particularly in towns. Milk-based sweets are popular.

Government
In 1991 the Constitution was amended to give legislative power to a 300 member parliament, Jatiya Sangsad, whose members are mostly elected by universal suffrage for five years. The Council of Ministers holds executive power under a prime minister appointed by the ruling party. The president is the nominal head of state, elected by parliament for five years.

Politics in modern Bangladesh are confrontational and violent; in 1975 the first prime minister and president (father of the current prime minister) was murdered; President Ziaur Rahman (husband of the present Prime Minister) was assassinated in 1981.

In 1991 the BNP was elected to power with Begum Khaleda Zia, the first woman Prime Minister. In 1996, she was elected again despite a controversially small turnout. In the campaign at least 13 people were killed and hundreds wounded. Because of fraud, the electoral commission overseeing the election cancelled a third of the 300 seats. Zia is now in her third term as Prime Minister.

In February 2000 with widespread discontent the Public Safety Act (PSA) that extended already sweeping police powers, including arbitrary arrest, came into effect, but crime still rose. Most embarrassing was the direct criminal activities among some ruling-party and district-level leaders who acted like gangster bosses.

Relations with Pakistan improved after President Musharraf expressed regret in 2002 for the “excesses of 1971” during Bangladesh’s struggle for independence.

Bangladesh joined the UN in 1974 and contributes to many peacekeeping missions. She is also a member of the WTO, the Commonwealth, the South Asian Association for Regional Co-operation (SAARC), the SAARC Preferential Trading Agreement, the Non-aligned Movement, and the Organisation of Islamic Conference.

Health and education
Acute overcrowding, insufficient food (much of the population subsists on rice), poverty, and poor sanitation produce widespread poor health. Many people suffer from malaria, cholera, and tuberculosis, often untreated because of too few doctors and health facilities. Annual insecticide spraying in swamps and marshes has curbed malaria, but routine spraying has unknown impacts on the environment.

Primary education is free but not compulsory, for five years; half the children receive no education; the literacy rate is low. There are three levels of secondary education. Rural education is less well funded than urban schools.

Most of the 600 colleges, some of them vocational and polytechnical, are affiliated to the three main universities in Dhaka, Rajshahi, and Chittagong. Advanced education is marked by endemic political unrest among students.

Courts
The judiciary operates much as it did under British occupation, although the 1972 constitution split the Supreme Court into Appellate and High Courts. Under military rule, Supreme Court powers are greatly weakened. In 1977 the Supreme Judicial Council was introduced to facilitate removal of judges. In 1986 a circuit system for judges was introduced.

Transport
Railways are state-run. There is a state-owned road transport company, but most roads are dirt tracks - inland waterways are crucial to transport; five major river and sea ports are at Chalna and Chittagong. International airports are at Dhaka and Chittagong. City dwellers rely on hiring cycle rickshaws and three-wheeler motorbikes. During floods, flat boats are powered manually by poles.

Media
State-run radio and TV are broadcast in English and Bengali; radio news is also in Urdu, Hindi, Burmese, and Arabic. Poor literacy rates mean newspaper circulations are small. Most newspapers are privately-owned and relatively free of state intervention.

The economy
The mixed economy is dominated by agriculture, contributing between 25 and 40 percent of GDP in recent years, followed by services, then transport and communications. Per capita GNP ranks among the world’s lowest.

Farmland is one of Bangladesh’s few natural resources. Farming employs two-thirds of the workforce. Rice and wheat are the major crops; others include sugarcane, jute, tea, pulses, fruit, tobacco, sesame, and vegetables. Key livestock are beef and dairy cattle, goats, water buffalo, and sheep. Bangladesh is the largest exporter and the second largest producer of raw jute in the world, producing about 20 percent.

The most widespread plant is a bamboo species that supplies the paper industry, with mills at Chandraghona, Chhatak, and Paksey, and a paper and board mill at Khulna.

The rivers, swamps, and estuaries in the Bay of Bengal delta are rich in freshwater fish.
Manufacturing is mainly based on processing agricultural products and imported raw materials, including urea fertiliser, jute, tea, sugar, rerolled-steel products, crude-steel ingots, paper, petroleum, chemicals, food products, and cotton textiles.

Yarn and textiles are the most important cottage industry, while cigarettes known as bidis, carpets, ceramics, and cane furniture are also produced by homeworkers.
Garments, hosiery products, and knitwear are the major exports mainly to the US and the EU, accounting for over 76 percent of exports in 2002.

Under neoliberalism and deregulation, GDP growth increased from an average 3.4 percent in the 1970s and 1980s to 4.9 percent in the 1990s. The top customs rate fell from 350 percent in 1991 to 32.5 percent in 2002.

India and Pakistan offer Bangladesh limited preferential exports. India recently exempted 40 Bangladesh export items from some customs duties. In July 2002, Pakistan offered duty- and quota-free access for Bangladesh’s jute exports, and 10,000 tonnes of tea each year duty free.
Aid donors identify social violence and institutionalised corruption as major barriers to economic development.

Over 90 percent of electricity is generated by thermal and hydroelectric power stations.
Tourism is based on Dhaka, the royal Bengal tiger, ethnic minority tribes, ancient sites, and Cox’s Bazar, Chittagong – at 75 miles (120 km) long is the world’s longest beach.

After independence in 1971, the government nationalised electricity, water, and sewerage utilities, development of forest industries, and road transport, but by 1983 most had been privatised again after a policy U-turn in 1979 switched to export-led economic development.

Natural gas is plentiful, but mining it is small-scale. Metal and petrochemicals are imported.
The value of exports is only about half that of imports; exports are mainly ready-made garments, jute and jute products, tea, hides, and leather goods. Exports go to the US, Germany, the UK, and Italy. Imports are mainly textile yarn, fabrics, made-up articles, machinery, transport equipment, petroleum and petrochemicals, chemicals, iron, steel, dairy products, and eggs. Most imports are from Japan, South Korea, and the US.

Labour
Industrialisation began in nineteenth century Bengal. Wildcat industrial action was common. Labour organising began in the early 1900s encouraged by politicians who wanted independence, marking the start of labour’s involvement with national politics that took precedence over labour issues, a problem that still exists.

The British limited political involvement by labour groups, giving the colonialists great influence over the direction of unionism. Their laws, introduced during the 1920s, were so effective in controlling labour that the administration retained them when the British were forced out of India in 1947. Preparing for independence, Bengali leaders lobbied for an independent Bengal state but Mahatma Gandhi and the Congress Party refused. East Bengali leaders then successfully lobbied to become the eastern part of the much wealthier (West) Pakistan.

A peak of industrial disputes by the mid-1950s forced improvements to some restrictive labour laws in 1955, but did not include the right to strike, and industrial unrest intensified until 1958 when the government imposed martial law. Even this did not eliminate strikes that continued into the 1960s, when labour law was improved, including a limited right to strike. Until recently, women were excluded from paid work, but official policies now encourage the ‘feminisation of labour’ particularly in Bangladesh’s garment factories. In 1976 the Ministry of Women was created to ensure a 10 percent quota of women in government-owned firms. Non-governmental organisations (NGO) that have proliferated along with Third World production are credited with training women in garment production. The government also promotes change in women’s traditional roles, for example living away from her family, travelling alone, and wearing modern clothes.

Unemployment and underemployment are grave problems.

In the 1970s and 1980s many workers migrated to the Middle East to work in the construction and petroleum industries; money remitted home by migrant workers is a major source of hard currency. As one of the UN-defined ‘least developed countries’, Bangladesh depends on foreign aid; the World Bank, US, and Japan are major donors.

Bangladesh is one of the least industrialised countries in South Asia; 80 percent of the people live in the countryside, though rural migrants go increasingly to the cities. There are only three major cities: Dhaka (the largest), Chittagong (major port), and Khulna (commerce and industry centre). Industrial areas, e.g. Kalurghat, Sholashahar, and Faujdar Hat, have emerged near Chittagong. Two cement factories at Chhatak cannot meet growing demand. There is a shipyard and dry dock in Khulna, and a steel mill at Chittagong.

Bangladesh has ratified 33 International Labour Organisation conventions including Nos 87 and 98 on rights of assembly and collective bargaining.

In 1977 a government regulation demanded all political parties have a ‘labour front’, underlining the dominant political function of unions. This created more unions, but because of their political role, rivalry between them intensified with no perceptible benefits for workers. Labour militancy has not really changed government policy.

In 1984 a national union centre emerged to which individual unions could affiliate; the United Front of Workers and Employees (SKOP) was formed to create a non-partisan group for unions. SKOP has been prominent in major issues like privatisation and redundancy policy.

Although SKOP won the right to organise and negotiate according to labour laws, soon after its formation predominantly women garment workers began to organise because these rights were ignored – some attribute this to unions’ political status having priority over labour issues; many strikes are actually called by political parties; workers accuse union leaders of doing private deals with management and selling out the members (a situation familiar in First World countries).

The legal minimum wage is Tk930 (US$20.00) a month, but the wage actually paid is around Tk700 a month. Average wages (unskilled and semi-skilled) are about Tk2,000 a month.

Labour laws and union rights are ignored by employers. Most workers generally put in 14-16 hours a day, seven days a week; overtime is compulsory and underpaid; there is no job security, no provident fund, no bonus, and employers provide no housing or transport; safety and health conditions at work are poor - factory deaths are common.

Privatisation
A well-supported general strike against government privatisation plans paralysed Bangladesh on 16 September 2003. Opposition political parties backed the strike.

100 enterprises are planned for privatisation by 2005, perhaps costing 150,000 jobs. The government claims it would save up to US$250 million. Privatisation is supported by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund.

Labour in the export sector
Most foreign currency is earned by garment exports.

Encouraged by the formation of the MFA in 1974, Bangladesh launched an export oriented economic system in the late 1970s based almost entirely on clothing production employing predominantly young women.

In 1976 a joint venture between local industrialist Noorul Quader and Korea’s Daewoo chaebol expanded Bangladesh’s 47 garment factories; by 1987 garment workers numbered 250,000 in 700 plants; by 2000 the industry employed 1.8 million workers in about 3,480 factories, contributing almost US$5 billion to the economy. However by the end of 2001 about 350,000 of these workers were redundant as 1,278 factories had closed; the closures are widely accredited to the 9 11 attack in New York and its negative effect on trade. In 2002, One World South Asia claimed that the garment sector recovered to contribute US$4.6 billion in export income.

Export processing zones (EPZ)
As in many other countries, following a policy switch from economic development based on import substitution (protects local production, creates import barriers) to export-led economic development, EPZs in Bangladesh were introduced to be ‘investor-friendly’; the corollary of the term of course is ‘worker-unfriendly’, whereby national and international labour standards are routinely ignored to provide cheap labour for foreign investors, and where most of these exploited workers are women.
The Bangladesh Export Processing Zones Authority (BEPZA) Act was passed in 1980 to control production within the EPZs, to be implemented by the BEPZA.

Bangladesh’s first EPZ opened in Chittagong in 1983; the second at Savar in 1993. Subsequently, four EPZs were established at Mongla, in Iswurdi, Comilla and Nilphamari.

The EPZs have three types of investment provisions – Type A is totally foreign-owned, Type B is joint-venture, and Type C is locally-owned.

Accused by critics of seeking protection for domestic US production, the US regularly demands that minimum labour standards be written into international trade agreements. China’s People’s Daily, 28 September 2003: “For the last three years, the United States has been putting pressure on the Bangladeshi government to allow trade union activities in the EPZs from [1] January 2004 in terms of receiving Generalized System of Preferences (GSP) and duty-free access of Bangladeshi garment in the US markets.”

“The US Ambassador to Dhaka Harry K Thomas Jr told businessmen Wednesday that Bangladesh should improve labour conditions in EPZs by January 2004 as a condition for keeping its GSP privileges and warned that the United States would withdraw the privilege if it failed to honour its commitment.”

“But the government faced counter-pressure from the major investors like South Korea, Japan, and Malaysia in the Chittagong EPZ. The investors warned that they would withdraw their investment if trade unions were allowed in the EPZ.”

This situation led to well-publicised high-level meetings of the key groups (the World Bank, EPZ investors, US labour centre AFL-CIO, US labour department officials, the BEPZA, Dhaka-based embassy representatives from the US, Japan, and Korea, and the ILO) towards the end of 2003, after which officials said that a plan to resolve the matter should be drafted in January 2004 after more meetings with the interested parties. All these parties agreed to a one month extension of the January deadline for active unions in EPZs, which enjoy a well-enforced law banning unions in EPZs.

Multi-Fibre Arrangement/Agreement
The MFA has become a point of concern for Third World countries like Bangladesh and Sri Lanka that concentrate on garment production for export; they are criticised for too little diversity in exports.
The MFA was implemented in 1974, and extended several times until its inclusion in the World Trade Organisation’s Agreement on Textiles and Clothing (ATC) in 1995, which declared a phased end to MFA quotas by 1 January 2005. Despite this date being so close, little phasing out has occurred, and garment workers, many who reasonably expected the end of the MFA to be in Third World interests, are now worried that new rules, particularly details concerning ‘local origin’ of manufacture, are to be considerably strengthened, and will lead to job cuts, as cloth for the industry has to be imported.
Except for nations with the UN’s ‘least developing country’ status the MFA operates on import quotas, a system of brazenly undisguised protectionism in favour of the US and EU, which calculate annual quotas for each category of ‘ready made garments’. Once any quota is filled under an import licensing system, no more imports of that category are allowed. However transnational corporations (TNC) exploit a loophole in the system, allowing them to send garments to places with unfilled quotas, add a label claiming it was made there, and re-export them as domestic exports. This is why ATC rules on ‘local origin’ will be considerably tightened up in 2005.

The looming changes in the international apparel trade have intensified workers’ sense of job insecurity in countries like Bangladesh.

However Bangladesh Commerce Minister, Amir Khasru Mahmud Chowdhury, believes there is no reason to panic providing that investors diversify production quickly. He advises garment exporters to explore other world markets because Bangladesh will be competing with other Third World countries for US markets. However foreign investors, with no loyalty to either Bangladesh or her workers, dominate the investment market and are likely to wait until the eleventh hour before deciding where their investments will go. Investors take two thirds of garment export earnings for reinvestment and raw material imports, vastly reducing foreign currency earnings for Bangladesh itself.

Minister Chowdhury claims to have made good progress negotiating new garment markets in Australia, Canada, China, EU, India, Norway, and South Korea, but the Far Eastern Economic Review is unconvinced about his claims.

Child labour
Bangladesh has one of the highest rates of child labour in Asia. After Bangladesh introduced the ‘Child Labour Deterrence Act’ in 1993, thousands of children lost jobs in the garment industry, but many found work in more dangerous workplaces, e.g. manufacturing bicycles where the act appears not to be enforced; some turned to prostitution. Bicycle manufacturing is said to expose workers to strong chemical gases, excessive heat in welding areas, and unsafe machinery.