Farhana Sultana knows that the relationship between human beings and their environment is endlessly complex. As both an academic and social advocate, she is dedicated to exploring the connection between ecological problems and human rights issues in her native Bangladesh. Trained as a Geologist who pursued Geography in graduate school, Sultana confronts both natural and social science perspectives in her research. “I know about the earth and I love it, but I was more interested in the people. The one discipline where you could study earth sciences and still do social sciences and social theory was Geography,� said Sultana during a recent interview from her office in the University of Minnesota’s Geography department.
As a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Minnesota, Sultana has studied
the effects that water-related issues such as flooding, the corrupt shrimp
industry, and now arsenic contamination have had on Bangladesh’s poor
population and especially on the nation’s poor women: “No one is asking
the social
and gender questions as they relate to arsenic poisoning or to flooding.
People have studied the technical, ecological, medical, and engineering-related
aspects of these problems, but no one has considered their effects on
the day to day lives of very poor people, especially poor women.�
Sultana will return to Bangladesh in September to study water issues
and their effects on women in preparation for her doctoral dissertation.
As she prepares
for her trip she points to the importance of her 1997 Fellowship in Bangladesh,
where she gathered information for her Master’s thesis: “I went to study
the class and gender aspects of government policies and water policies.
I explored
women’s particular voice and power in policy making and the impact that
various water policies had on very poor women.�
Sultana explained the nature of her Master’s project, “My thesis was actually
two Masters papers. First, I was interested in flood control and flood
management. Bangladesh is famous for its floods, and I undertook a gender
analysis of
different policies on flood control and irrigation as well as tropical
cyclone disaster
management. Second, I pursued the human rights violations and ecological
devastation in the shrimp aquaculture industry.�
Flooding is an integral part of Bangladesh’s geological landscape. Home
to the mouth of the Ganges and Brahmaputra rivers, as much as eighty
percent of the country can be covered in water if both rivers flood
at the same
time.
Although this flooding has always been a strength of the region’s farmland
(the floods replenish the topsoil with valuable silt), exponential population
growth in recent decades has brought an extra burden to the land.
“During flood season the banks of the river shift and a lot of people
get displaced, living in temporary hardship. With extended flooding,
hardships
are exacerbated.
Some people end up having to live on their roofs for up to three months,�
said Sultana. World attention came to Bangladesh’s flood issues in
1988, a year
of especially severe devastation. Major investors including the World
Bank and the United Nations pledged to make the nation flood free.
This action,
called the Flood Action Plan (FAP), started a debate that lasted throughout
the 1990’s. “You could not have a conversation in Bangladesh without
talking about the FAP. That’s what sparked my interest in the project.
I wanted
to study the voices of the poor marginal farmers, of the women,� she
said.
The FAP was halted in the late 1990’s, but the embankments created
by the project continue to effect people in the region, particularly
women:
“Building
embankments
can have an enormous effect on the gender aspects. Cutting off water
to small streams and altering the hydrology of a region increases
women’s burden and
labor time in procuring domestic water. Certain weeds and reeds that
are
a part of the nutritional balance can no longer be gathered. Women
often bear
the brunt of those hardships.�
The second part of Sultana’s project studied the detrimental effects
of the region’s shrimp industry: “The environment was changing
because of
large
amounts of salinity introduced by the shrimp industry. Rice paddies
were converted
to saline shrimp ponds and drinking water was being affected, as
were certain resources like fruit trees and other crops which couldn’t
grow
in the soil.�
Asia’s shrimp industry is a “boom or bust� operation heavily influenced
by world demand and the constant threat of viral infection of
the shrimp crop.
These factors make it a mobile industry that thrives in developing
regions such as Bangladesh, India, and Thailand where labor is
cheap. “The shrimp
industry has brought all sorts of human rights violations including
abuse, rape, and
reports of workers being guarded at all times. There has been
out-migration of men from such areas due to collapsing livelihoods,
often leaving
women and children to defend for themselves, who often end up
being cheap labor
for the
shrimp industry. These are only some of the ills that result
from a rapidly changing social and ecological structure. But if they
completely pull
the industry out what would happen? We would have the collapse
of an
entire
economy that
depends on this industry, especially the foreign exchange the
state
gets from its exports. It’s a complicated situation,� Sultana
explained.
The complexity of issues such as this is what has always driven
Sultana to study the contradictory relationships between Bangladesh’s
land
and its people.
She came to the United States to study Geology and Environmental
Science at Princeton University. After graduating she moved
to the University
of Minnesota
where she began her Master’s studies as a Macarthur Fellow
in the fall of 1996. It was here that she learned of the Upper Midwest
Fellowship Program and received
a grant to conduct field research for her Master’s projects
in
the summer of 1997.
Sultana intended to return to her graduate program after completing
her Masters in 1998, but instead took a position at the United
Nations Development
Program
in Dhaka, Bangladesh. Her two and a half years managing the
UNDP’s largest global environmental program were an eye-opening
experience:
“I really
got to see the belly of the beast, how policy gets made and
how it works. Through
my twenty-six projects I got to engage with various environmental
projects, several water-related projects and I got to push
for gender mainstreaming
in the projects, which is important to me.�
After leaving the U.N.D.P., Sultana returned to the University
of Minnesota where she is studying a new issue in water
rights and gender
equality:
“Much of Bangladesh’s ground water holds arsenic. My dissertation
is looking at
arsenic contamination and the implications that has on
a public health crisis where
35 million people are drinking contaminated water.�
There is debate among scientists over the role that humans
have played in the arsenic contamination, but it is obvious
to Sultana
that proper
policy
has
not been made to protect the nation’s women and underprivileged:
“I’m not convinced that gender concerns have been structurally
integrated into both
policy and
practice. Many poor people are not literate and do not
have access to education about arsenic contamination,
especially women. Women
are
responsible
for
domestic water. If they’re not able to fulfill that gender
role, it has implications on their domestic bargaining
power
and livelihoods.
This
drinking water crisis
is affecting them in many different ways, from increases
in burdens to illnesses to social ostracization. I am
interested in the
acceptance and voice that
poorer
women have in the ways arsenic mitigation projects and
policies are currently
being formulated and the impacts of these policies and
projects.�
As Sultana considers her plans beyond completion of her
doctoral studies at the University of Minnesota, she
knows she will
continue to blend
academic research with policy advocacy while studying
women’s rights to water in
Bangladesh: “Poor women’s needs and voices were and
are not being heard in the corridors
of power. There are a lot of factors that never made
it into policy making. The focus of the issues I have
studied
has
shifted slightly
as conditions
have
changed, but it is still about water. My focus is still
on human rights to water, to sustainable and equitable
livelihoods,
as
well as nature’s
rights
to sustainability and integrity. I think that will
always be central to my research endeavors. There are a myriad
of issues
in Bangladesh
for me
to
study for a lifetime.�