It’s good to have to test a person’s knowledge and notions of a country. However, I don’t believe that you have been there. I have. And not as one of the thousands of “sex tourists”.
One of my best friends is Bangladeshi, and we have talked about conditions in his homeland often over the years. Certainly, that in no way makes me well informed about the country, but most of my impressions of it come from him.
Evidently, your Google search didn’t give you any hits on the reality of Bangladesh. Bangladesh (East Pakistan or East Bangle) is heavily contaminated with Arsenic as is West Bangle (a province of India), this is a geologic problem caused by the location of the aquifer and not a human created problem.
Please, no insults. We've been pretty good about not descending to name calling. I never claimed that Bangladesh was a paradise, or free from environmental issues. The primary source I cited was the World Resources Institute, an environmental think tank. I also used the UN FAO (Food and Agriculture Organization) data, as well as the USDA and other US and Canadian government websites.
The contamination issue you mention was mentioned in the CIA World Factbook, which I previously cited:
"Environment - current issues:
many people are landless and forced to live on and cultivate flood-prone land; water-borne diseases prevalent in surface water; water pollution, especially of fishing areas, results from the use of commercial pesticides; ground water contaminated by naturally occurring arsenic; intermittent water shortages because of falling water tables in the northern and central parts of the country; soil degradation and erosion; deforestation; severe overpopulation"
https://www.cia.gov/cia/publications/factbook/geos/bg.html#Geo
While the “service industry” produces 59.5% of the GNP, the agricultural sector is where 66% of people are employed. Most of the people are poor, 45% below the poverty line. The wealthy are very wealthy, 10% of the population controls 28% of the GNP, the very poor are unimaginably poor, 10% controls 3.9% of the GNP. Contrast that to the distribution of wealth in North America or Europe.
https://www.cia.gov/cia/publications/factbook/geos/bg.html#Econ
Did you know that the UN and the World Health Organization have a contraception program for girls 10 – 14 in Bangladesh? It’s needed. While I was there, a 7 year old bore a child. The link below has the chart.
Did you know that 60 years is an improvement in the age of death?
Did you know that Bangladesh still has Polio?
Did you know that 75% of Bangladesh’s children are malnourished?
http://www.whoban.org/country_health_profile.html
This is why I have a great deal of difficulty accepting the agricultural numbers you have given. There are other reasons:
I have witnessed what happens today when a cyclone hits the rice paddies. The land is incredibly fertile when the crops are allowed to mature. Often the crops don’t mature.
The entire country is a river delta. If Global Warming results in a 1 foot increase in Mean Sea Level, that will be a disaster for Bangladesh. Look at what happens along the Mississippi, imagine an entire country that is like that every time a wet storm hits the mountains to the north.
The country suffered “land reform” when it liberated itself from Pakistan. You don’t use tractors on 100 foot by 300 foot plots of land. The tractors you refer to belong to the 10% that are very rich.
I never said that Bangladesh was a great country to live in, I emphasized strongly that it is desperately overpopulated. Europe, Canada, and the US enjoy fantastic per capita resource advantages. That wasn't my point.
The starting point for the scientific analysis of population growth is the Logistic Equation. This simple equation says that population will rise until it reaches the carrying capacity of the environment, and after a transition period, it will stabilize to this level. Of course, this is only the most basic model (beyond simple geometric population growth, such as a bacterial colony), but this essential behavior is widely present in more realistic population models.
The climate in Bangladesh is sufficiently hospitable to human life, that they have multiplied to astonishing levels. In doing so, they may be creating environmental hazards which will ultimately damage the long term carrying capacity of the region. But such incredible overpopulation cannot occur in a sparsely populated, desolate place such as Greenland. The Arctic will never face the crushing overpopulation of countries such as Indonesia or much of India and China. Prior to the Industrial Revolution, India and China possessed vastly greater wealth than the European states. Recall that European explorers searched relentlessly for centuries for trade routes to access the riches of Asia. Some even went so far as to attempt to sail around the world.
I invite you to compare the proportion of arable land and crop yields in Mediterranean countries such as France, Spain, Italy, and Greece to their far Northern European counterparts in Sweden, Norway, and Finland. Even in Canada, large expanses of permafrost are a major impediment to development. The US has more than 4 times as much arable land as Canada, and over twice the crop yield per acreage, hence about 10 times the food production capacity, and unsurprisingly 10 times the population.
Long term, you need food supplies for a population to grow. Lack of food will either lead to migrations or declining population. Short term, catastrophic overshoots and collapse can occur. Agriculture is the reason that there are over 6 billion people alive today, a thousand times their pre-Agricultural numbers. Agriculture requires fertile land, and it's why people fight and die by the millions to control it.
