By Anis Chowdhury
SYDNEY, Dec 16 2024 – This piece is not about the crisis or the chaos that the country is now facing after successfully toppling the autocratic regime of Sheikh Hasina. Rather, it is about the crisis of confidence and social capital or trust — interlinked, nonetheless.

Anis Chowdhury

The thread that binds a nation together is trust or social capital. There could be many factors that contribute to social capital, but one that stands out is equity or fairness. Social capital or trust is low in a country where income and wealth gaps are high, and the general people feel unfairly treated or deprived.

The fallen autocratic regime prided itself on rapid economic growth, averaging approximately 6 per cent a year. However, the regime’s kleptocratic system of ruling by plunder and favour to its cronies has contributed to accelerated wealth and income gaps as well as relative deprivation; thus, it has caused fissures in the social fabric.

Rising relative deprivation

Income and wealth gaps have yawned wide, turning a reasonably equitable society at the time of independence into one of the most unequal societies. The Gini coefficient, a common measure of income inequality, has increased from 0.36 in 1973 to 0.499 in 2022, according to the latest (2022) Household Income and Expenditure Survey (HIES) of the Bangladesh Bureau of Statistics.

The Gini coefficient was 0.39 in 1990–1991, marginally above the 1973 value (0.36), accelerating to 0.46 in 2010. Income inequality in Bangladesh has deepened since 2016. The 2022 survey reveals that about 30 per cent of the income generated in the country is concentrated within the top 5 per cent of household. This proportion was 27.82 per cent in the 2016 Household Income and Expenditure Survey.

Furthermore, the top 10 per cent of the wealthiest households in Bangladesh hold about 41 per cent of total income. This proportion was about 38 per cent in 2016. Concurrently, the income share for the bottom 50 per cent of households decreased to about 19 per cent in 2022 from 20.23 per cent in 2016.

Disturbingly, there has been a secular transfer of income from the lowest quintile of the households to the highest quintile. The average annual loss of the bottom 1st quintile’s share in the national income has been -0.71 per cent as opposed to the average annual gain of 0.46 per cent for the highest (top) quintile during 1973–2010. The middle-class also lost; income shares of 2nd, 3rd and 4th quintiles declined since 1973.

This does not augur well for our democracy. Nor can we celebrate this development in a country where one of the founding principles is socialism.

Suppression of democracy driving growing disparities

PROFESSOR MG Quibria of Morgan State University and ADB’s former Senior Advisor pointed out, ‘possession of political capital opens up myriad economic opportunities, including preferential access to finance and business, restructuring and loan default options, lucrative employment, access to privileged information, tax evasion or even outright corruption’.

The link between corruption and economic growth could be debated, but it is a method of plunder and primitive capital accumulation by the lumpen bourgeoisie that exacerbates inequality of wealth.

An environment conducive to unchecked corruption emerges when democracy is suppressed and the institutions that ensure accountability, transparency and the separation of powers between various branches of the government are weakened. Where democratic institutions are weak, political capital is a powerful instrument for advancing one’s economic and social position.

Unfortunately, suppression of democracy in Bangladesh began as soon as it emerged as an independent nation with the rigging of its first parliamentary elections in 1973. It is ironic that a country, where democracy is one of its founding principles, turned into a one-party state in 1975 within four years of its independence, shutting down most of the news media and allowing only state-run ones.

Sadly, instead of trust — built through accountability and transparency — election manipulations became the norm for all political parties to gain power and then retain it. Therefore, each successive government became more repressive, more lacking in accountability and more vigorous in election rigging.

However, such regimes suffer from legitimacy deficits — both legal and moral; they can only survive by allowing corruption and distributing favour. Thus, a vicious circle develops — a regime that resorts to more election manipulations becomes more beholden to its cronies, allowing them to plunder the state.

Undoubtedly, this process reached its zenith during Sheikh Hasina’s rule. Unchecked corruption, tax evasions and financial crimes such as defrauding bank loans enabled Bangladesh to become the global leader in wealth growth during 2010–2019. New York-based research firm Wealth-X, reported a remarkable 14.3 per cent annual increase in the number of individuals with a net worth exceeding $5 million, surpassing Vietnam, which ranked second with a 13.2 per cent growth rate.

Neoliberalism and the demise of democracy

BANGLADESH is not alone in witnessing widening income and wealth gaps and consequently democratic backslides. This is a global phenomenon coincided with the embrace of the neoliberal economic philosophy of privatisation, liberalisation, deregulation and globalisation dictated by the interests of the corporate power.

In the process of multinational corporations-driven globalisation, the civil society simply became apolitical NGOs, happy to receive crumbs from the donors to engage in so-called development activities. Citizens became ‘stake-holders’ together with the large corporations and donors, instead of ‘right-holders’.

Bereft of rights and no longer an end itself of development, citizens are now ‘human resources’, an epitaph cleverly designed to hide that they are simply fodder for the profit machines of corporations. In a deregulated economy, workers are dehumanised, constrained to socialise and participate in political activities.

Should one be surprised in the falling share of wages in the national income, stagnating or falling real wages and tragedies like the ‘Rana Plaza incident’?

Under the corporate globalisation, schools and universities — both public and private — are no longer places of learning where youths are transformed into enlightened citizens and agents of change, and where visionary future social-political leaders are produced. They are simply factories for mass-producing so-called ‘job-ready’ certificate or diploma holders, apathetic to social, economic and political issues.

An additional boost to accelerating inequality in Bangladesh comes from a three-stream education system (Bengali-medium national curriculum, traditional religious curriculum and English-medium overseas curriculum). It perpetuates inter-generational inequality.

Which way out?

ONE can get some cue in AK Sen’s observation that ‘a country becomes fit through democracy,’ and democracy versus development is a false dichotomy. Sen defines development as freedom — freedom from hunger and poverty; freedom from fear and persecution; and freedom to express, associate and participate. In sum, freedom to enhance one’s capabilities to attain one’s full potential as a human being.

Sen insists that political and civil rights are ends in themselves. Their denial cannot be acceptable even if it promotes economic growth and some well-being as such a development path is not sustainable. Suppression of political and civil rights results in growing income and wealth inequalities, where obnoxious, luxurious living by the few coexists with a large populous struggling to survive. This fuels a sense of relative deprivation contributing to violent social conflict.

Therefore, the first step is strengthening democratic institutions or consolidation of democracy. This requires the depoliticisation of administration and civic associations.

There exists a large volume of research findings showing that the politicisation of administration and the organisation of civic associations along party lines not only boost corruption but also accelerate social cleavage.

Civic associations where members hold different political views help build trust among political parties. They can agree on critical national issues while still disagreeing on details.

A depoliticised public administration serves a wider citizenry. In the process, the government, even though led by the winning party, governs for all and becomes inclusive, thus strengthening the trust between the state and the governed.

As for the political parties, they need to practise democracy themselves. That is, all party posts should be open for contest and there should be transparent rules for elections. As the primary organisational vehicles of electoral democracy, political parties are themselves judged in terms of their democratic character.

The most engaging models of internal party democracy are inclusive, participatory, deliberative and accountable and include fair distribution of power. It involves non-discriminatory open memberships and the inclusion of all party members in decision-making processes, leadership selection, policy formulation, as well as ensuring accountability of party leadership to its members. In short, internal rules of political parties should be guided by inclusiveness, clarity, transparency, accountability and independence. Their interaction with society should be based on dialogue, interdependence and cooperation.

In the economic arena, there is an urgency for reorienting to pursue strategies for growth with equity. This is an imperative if Bangladesh is serious about its state principle of socialism. The state has to recapture its lost leverage over the corporate sector to protect the interest of the wider community and to ensure decent jobs and a fair living wage.

It has to give priority to citizens’ well-being over balancing the budget and be bold enough to use its fiscal power to redistribute the growing wealth by using progressive taxation and widening public provisions of basic services, such as healthcare, education, housing and universal social protection. There is ample evidence of a close negative association between the tax-GDP ratio and inequality as well as between public social expenditure and inequality, clearly indicating the redistributive role of the government.

State actions are needed to smoothen the rough edges of the market forces that manifest in exclusion and inequality, which are found to fuel social and political unrest harming growth in the long run. Equity of access, opportunities and outcomes are fundamental aspects of socialism. They enhance both economic and political freedom, essential for rights-based development that empowers citizens and expands their capabilities.

Weakened democratic institutions and rising inequality create a vicious circle that leads to diminished trust — among citizens and between the state and citizens — which chips away social capital, the glue that binds society.

Bangladesh has to find the solution to its woes in its founding principles — a democratic polity and a socialist economic construct. Both are critical in rebuilding trust and social capital, needed to overcome the current national crisis.

Anis Chowdhury is emeritus professor, Western Sydney University, Australia. He held senior United Nations positions (economic and Social affairs) in New York and Bangkok.

IPS UN Bureau

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By Sonia Al Ali
IDLIB, Syria, Dec 16 2024 – Detained without trial for over three years for trial for allegedly treating “terrorists” (as opponents of former Syrian President Bashar al-Assad were deemed), Alaa al-Khalil, a 33-year-old nurse from the Syrian city of Hama, recounts the agony of her time in a prison cell she shared with at least 35 women.

She was released from Aydnaya prison on December 8 after the fall of the Assad regime.

Following the fall of Assad’s regime and his escape to Moscow on December 8, armed opposition factions managed to open the doors of prisons, freeing hundreds of detainees who had endured the most horrific forms of torture for opposing Assad’s rule and demanding his removal from power. Many lost their lives within the prisons and were buried in mass graves, while the families of the detainees continue to search for their missing loved ones in the prisons of tyranny.

Years of Torture

“I was arrested at a security checkpoint belonging to the former Syrian regime and transferred to the Political Security Branch in Damascus—my hands were cuffed, and my eyes were blindfolded. In prison, we were 35 women in a small, cramped room with the toilet in the same room, without any privacy,” Khalil told IPS. “The marks of severe torture were clearly visible on some of the women. As for sleep, we would lie on the floor and take turns sleeping due to the very small size of the room. The most painful thing was that there were many pregnant women who gave birth to children who grew up inside the prison.”

The search for survivors in Sednaya prison. Credit: Abdul Karem al-Mohammad/IPS

During that time, she said the prisoners suffered from “hunger, cold, and all forms of torture, including beatings, burning with cigarettes, and nail pulling.”

Many of the female detainees were raped and exposed to sexual violence as a form of punishment. After midnight, the guards would come to the detainees’ room to select the most beautiful girls to take them to the officers’ rooms.

“We preferred torture and even death to rape. When a girl refused to have sex or confess to the charges against her during interrogation, she would be killed by the guards or interrogators, and her body would be thrown into the salt room, which was prepared in advance to preserve the bodies of the dead for as long as possible,” she said, tearfully remembering the daily trauma.

Khalil confirms that prisoners were not allowed to look at the guards, talk, or make any noise, even during torture. They were punished by being deprived of water or forced to sleep naked without covers in the freezing cold. The meals consisted of a few bites of spoilt food, and many people contracted serious infections, diseases, and mental disorders.

Now released, Khalil hopes to enjoy safety, stability, and peace in this country after years of oppression and injustice.

Adnan al-Ibrahim, 46, from the southern Syrian city of Daraa, was also released a few days ago from Adra prison on the outskirts of Damascus after spending over 10 years there on charges of defecting from Bashar al-Assad’s army and seeking asylum in Lebanon.

“I feel like I’m dreaming after being released from prison. They accused me of terrorism, subjected me to torture, and I was never brought before a court during my imprisonment. I’m still traumatized by what I endured,” Ibrahim says.

“We were subjected to the worst treatment imaginable in prisons. All we want now is the right to live a decent life, far from injustice, arbitrary arrests, and the ongoing killing in Syria.”

He is now emaciated and weak—his weight drastically reduced due to malnutrition and poor diet. Most of his fellow inmates suffered from life-threatening illnesses as a result of the torture they endured. Many inmates lost their memory due to being beaten on the head during interrogations, and the bodies of the dead remained for long periods before being removed. Many of these bodies were disposed of by burning.

Burdened by Psychological Prauma

Samah Barakat, a 33-year-old mental health specialist, says the survivors of Syrian detention centres will need help to overcome their traumas.

‘The experience of imprisonment and torture in prisons is painful and traumatic for survivors. Imprisonment is not limited to physical torture; the mental state is also affected. Prisoners were subjected to various forms of torture and oppression, leading to a significant deterioration in their mental health. These effects include a range of psychological disorders such as psychosis, memory loss, and speech impediments, in addition to the spread of diseases due to their deprivation of basic medical care.”

Barakat confirms that some detainees are likely to suffer from physical, psychological, and behavioural effects, accompanied by constant anxiety, depression, and social withdrawal.

She explains that survivors of detention need psychological support, which varies depending on the impact of the detention experience. Some need psychological counseling or therapy sessions with specialists, while others require medication prescribed by a psychiatrist due to depression or other mental illnesses.

An Unknown Fate

For some, the uncertainty of the fates of their loved ones means the trauma of the Asad regime lives on.

Alaa al-Omar, 52, from the northern Syrian city of Idlib, went to Saydnaya prison and the Palestine Branch in Damascus after the fall of the Assad regime, hoping to find his son, who had disappeared in the prison’s depths.

“I went to the prison with great longing, but I found no trace of my son. I think he died as a result of torture.”

Omar affirms that his son was arrested by the Assad regime forces in 2015 while studying at a university in Aleppo, accused of participating in demonstrations, carrying weapons, and joining the opposition factions.

Omar indicates he heard nothing from his son or about his son since his arrest, and his fate remains unknown even now.

Human Rights Violations

Human rights activist Salim Al-Najjar (41), from Aleppo, speaks about the suffering of survivors of detention and told IPS that the history of building prisons and expanding detention centers in Syria dated back to the rule of Hafez al-Assad, whose regime in the 1980s exercised excessive force against its opponents, turning the country into a “large slaughterhouse.”

“In the regime’s prisons, lives are as equal as stones in the hands of a sculptor, killed and discarded without regard or importance. In them, a person becomes a mere number, with their history, feelings, and even dreams that haunted them until the last moment of their lives ignored,” Najjar says.

Al-Najjar confirms the existence of many prisons in Syria, but the Saydnaya prison, located north of the Syrian capital Damascus, is known as the most prominent political detention center in Syria and was notorious for its horrific reputation as a site of torture and mass executions, especially after the outbreak of the Syrian revolution in 2011. Saydnaya prison was where Assad’s detained opponents or defectors from his army or those who rejected his “killing policy.”

He points out that few detainees were released through family connections or bribes, while the detainees were left to die from their untreated wounds and diseases in “dirty, overcrowded” cells.

He notes that many detainees emerged from behind bars suffering from a loss of their mental faculties, unable to remember their names or identify themselves, and due to the severe changes caused by malnutrition and brutal torture, their features had changed to the point that their families did not recognize them at first.

Najjar hopes to achieve justice for the victims by presenting evidence and documents to international courts and holding Assad and all perpetrators of violations in Syria accountable.

The Syrian Network for Human Rights said in a statement on December 11 that Assad is accused of killing at least 202,000 Syrian civilians, including 15,000 killed under torture, the disappearance of 96,000 others, and the forced displacement of nearly 13 million Syrian citizens, as well as other heinous violations, including the use of chemical weapons.

“Syrian detention centers and torture chambers symbolize the agony, oppression, and suffering that Syrians have endured for decades. Survivors of detention continue to heal their wounds and strive to return to their normal lives and reintegrate into society. Sadly, a significant number of them have perished under torture.”

IPS UN Bureau Report

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By Ousmane Badiane
DAKAR, Senegal, Dec 16 2024 – From increased pests and diseases to lower crop yields and extreme weather events, the adverse impacts of climate change on agriculture in Africa cannot be overstated.

Climate shocks will present major roadblocks to the continent’s rapidly growing population, especially if global temperatures remain on their upward trajectory. Urgent and effective action is therefore needed to mitigate these threats to food security and livelihoods.

Despite the growing stresses on Africa’s agrifood systems, the bioeconomy offers opportunities to improve food security, tackle climate change, and support development goals. The solution lies in sustainably leveraging Africa’s natural resources.

While the continent is highly vulnerable to climate change, its rich biodiversity offers tangible opportunities to address multiple challenges simultaneously. New evidence shows that Africa can leverage a much broader and more systemic approach to addressing the impacts of climate change on agrifood systems and beyond through its bioeconomy.

Characterized by sustainable production and use of biological resources to create innovative products, processes, and services for all economic sectors, bioeconomy involves the use of scientific knowledge to add social and economic value to biological resources in an environmentally sustainable way.

The latest ReSAKSS Annual Trends and Outlook Report (ATOR) makes a case for converging the two pressing agendas of climate change and the bioeconomy toward building resilient agrifood systems in Africa. Harnessing Africa’s ecological wealth and investing in the continent’s bioeconomy can yield multiple development benefits across various sectors while contributing to climate resilience, sustainable agriculture, and economic growth.

Science and technology offer a viable pathway for the development of bioeconomy solutions. African countries will benefit from establishing robust science, research, and technology systems to leverage opportunities offered by the bioeconomy. Research initiatives to develop climate-resilient tools for farmers can go a long way in protecting food security and livelihoods from climate shocks.

A successful example is the redesign of Uganda’s research system through the National Agricultural Advisory Services program. This program focused on rebuilding relationships across the country’s agrifood system value chain, from the farm level all the way to regional chiefs, district coordinators, and private or semi-private service delivery companies.

Through this approach, farmers defined demand and had their research and innovation needs addressed through a national coordination network combined with the private sector. This has improved the availability and quality of advisory services provided to farmers and promoted the adoption and use of modern production technologies and practices.

Furthermore, Africa’s bioeconomy can create rural and agriculture-adjacent jobs for its youthful population while enabling economic diversification and growth. Leveraging Africa’s vast untapped potential will open up new industries and value chains that can drive job creation and livelihoods across the continent, especially for rural youth and other marginalized groups.

Emerging innovations like biological waste conversion using black soldier flies (BSF), and earthworms have opened up new markets and, consequently, new job opportunities. At the same time, these circular solutions benefit natural ecosystems, in turn supporting better conditions for crop and livestock production systems.

Domestic and cross-border trade also plays a vital role in facilitating economic growth through the bioeconomy. Increasing food demand can drive specialization and intensification of the agrifood sector and bioeconomy, ultimately incentivizing productivity, supply, and income increases. Existing policy tools such as the AfCFTA can reduce trade barriers across the continent’s bioeconomy and deliver better economic outcomes.

Recent research argues for a nutrition-sensitive circular bioeconomy that can be adopted to drive food security and nutrition outcomes while tackling waste management. For example, converting biowaste to vermicompost, biofertilizers, and biopesticides can reduce the costs and environmental burdens of synthetic chemicals while simultaneously improving agricultural productivity and food availability.

Strengthening the bioscience environment across sectors is critical. Under the Advanced Agriculture and Food cluster, South Africa’s Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) aims to increase the output of high-value foods, cosmetics, nutraceuticals, and traditional African medical products. The Biomanufacturing Industry Development Centre (BIDC) has advanced over 100 bioproducts in cosmetics, nutrition, and biotechnology. A key success story from this case study is VIDA Pharmaceuticals, which produces accessible and affordable nutritious food products from baobab and maize.

In the wake of COP29, channeling more climate finance toward Africa’s bioeconomy is critical. Increasing investments in innovative financing models such as blended finance – which leverages concessional capital from public and philanthropic sources to de-risk private investments – can support climate goals in Africa’s agrifood systems.

There is political momentum for Africa’s converging climate change and bioeconomy agendas. South Africa was the first African country to develop a dedicated bioeconomy strategy in 2013, followed by Namibia, which published its national bioeconomy strategy in 2024. The East African Community (EAC) is the first regional economic bloc to develop a dedicated regional bioeconomy strategy in 2022.

The global shift toward sustainability and the green economy presents new opportunities for Africa to position itself as a leader in the bioeconomy. Policy action to embrace an African bioeconomy would entail the ability to deploy tailored and contextualized interventions to tackle climate change, biodiversity loss, and food insecurity while advancing sustainable growth.

Increased investments in Africa’s resilience and green growth agendas from the continent’s leaders, private sectors, and other stakeholders are the first steps towards realizing this potential. The promise of a robust bioeconomy offers a viable growth and development pathway that can contribute to lower carbon emissions, better preservation of biodiversity, and greater prospects for decent jobs and livelihoods.

Dr. Ousmane Badiane, Executive Chairperson, AKADEMIYA2063

IPS UN Bureau

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