I saw this article on the CHT on the BBC website today:

“According to the UN’s development programme, about 125,000 people have been affected by food shortages and the rats.
Some have started to receive aid, but unless more arrives soon these people will be cut off from the outside world, without any food to eat for months.”

AFP beat them to the punch though last month:
“Thousands of people in remote southeast Bangladesh are facing famine after a plague of rats destroyed their crops, forcing families to rely on dwindling food stocks, officials said.

Flowering of bamboo forests for the first time in 50 years in areas along the border with India has led to a so-called “rat-flood” — rodents who have multiplied in number by feeding on bamboo blossoms, rice stalks and vegetables.”

A plague of rats, of all things! It was as if we didn’t have enough to contend with, after going through last summer’s flooding and Sidr, on top of the political-economic storms that have continued unabated for what seems like forever. Bangladesh is always recovering from one disaster or another. If we spend all our time getting back up after getting knocked, when are we expected to get on with the business of development?

This brings us to the first point of this post: we need to reorient our strategic planning from being adaptive (reactive) to be more forward-looking (proactive). From what I gather, the warning systems and shelters that we have on the coast saved countless lives this past cyclone. But those measures all came into being after several brutally hard lessons. If past governments had made those strategic investments in early warning systems and damage control infrastructure earlier, would the human cost of Sidr have been as high as they are now? Could equivalent warning and mitigation strategies been developed for last summer’s flood, or for the floods that are sure to come this summer?

Coming back to the topic at hand, could our past or present governments have done something to mitigate the nascent humanitarian disaster in the CHT? After all, who could’ve predicted something as random as a plague of rats, right? Strangely enough, the writing’s been on the wall for a while, since this plague happens every 50 years apparently. Even if we acknowledge that our institutional memory may not be that long, the Daily Star and other media were reporting on this as late as last October. In the reports from back then, it seemed as though those several government agencies, including the office of the Advisor for CHT Affairs, were rolling up their sleeves and helping out. Strangely enough, I couldn’t find much reference in the current reports to the official response to this crisis, aside from the UNDP relief activities. So, is enough being done? What happened to the TK 15 lakh that the Advisor was sending to Rangamati? I’m sure these are questions that the gentleman interviewed by the BBC - and now forced to feed rats to his starving family - would like answered.

This brings me to the second and final point of this post. What the government (past and present, local and central) cannot afford to forget is that inaction and underaction at both the strategic planning and damage control levels have consequences that go beyond economic hardship. We are already on the edge of the precipice. This unchecked plague of rats may be what pushes the Hills into the hole, a little earlier and a little harder. Unless more is done sooner, when Bangladesh comes back from over the edge, the overriding memory for the Jumma-majority CHT survivors will be one of a central administration that did not care about them when there was still time to make a difference. They will remember, and add their forgotten, marginalized voices to the chorus for autonomy that have not been silenced in decades, and will not be silent as long as the shadow of negligence remains.