=== Transcript ===

Martin Rentsch: "I was just going to say there is lots of debate also in German politics with the two ministries funding development and funding humanitarian assistance, how to connect the both. What's in the middle? That's a big debate."

Bithika Biswas: "The reality of the ground is something different. This is no clear-cut deviation or guideline."

Martin Rentsch: "That's probably the most important part because people sitting on their desk in Berlin they can't decide what's right here. Sometimes something they are missing because this is humanitarian and this is development and they don't see the reality."

As the Head of Communications of the World Food Programm, Martin Rentsch, recounts, on a policy level, humanitarian aid and development work are largely handled as seperate areas in german politics. In the public discourse, there is a similiar effect, both are often addressed seperately with discussions on humanitarian aid mainly revolving around donation campaigns after disasters and development work mainly focused in postcolonial discussions around who profits from development programs and why. These discussions are important and necessary, and the administrative seperation has a certain logic, but both are often far removed from the reality on the ground, as Bithika Biswas, Head of the Rangpur Field Office of the World Food Program interjected into this conversation on the Banks of the Brahmaputra in the north of Bangladesh.

Just in the context of humanitarian aid, simple problems arise from those policy classifications so common to european or western debattes in the global north on these issues, for example, the World Food Program avoids the terminology climate migrants, because this has legal implications making it more difficult to provide their support to people who are displaced due to flooding. These conversations are the product of a press trip to Bangladesch, a trip which aimed to show the reality of climate change and it's impact to the world, which I was given the opportunity to join.

As we drove through Kurigram, one of the poorest regions of the country, it was quite obvious to me that to really help all those people suffering the most from the consequences of growth based industrialism, western conceptions of humanitarian aid and development work falls hort of that, which the situation requires. The ever severer and ever more devastating floods in the north of Bangladesh showcase this need especially well. At the time of my visit, the last severe flood in this region which stretches along the Brahmaputra river had been four years before, in 2020. Bithika Biswas, Head of the Rangpur Field Office of the World Food Program, who comes from the nearby city of Rangpur, gave me a partial insight into the consequences of these increasingly more severe floods.

Bithika Biswas: "What the local people said is that the flood was here from the initial stage. But the intensity, the frequency is increasing day by day. And the longevity also. And as a result, maybe more, more crop damage or people have to stay inside without any work. This type of impacts. Because during the flood, sometimes it happens that the flood water continues, stays almost one month or maybe more, then the people have no work. They have to just stay in the house. There is a food scarcity then and no earning."

The flooding she references is mainly caused by heavy rainfall during monsoon season, but also through more and more meltwater coming down from the Himalayas on the other side of the Border, in India and Nepal, during increasingly warmer summers. There is a measurable increase of the monsoon rains by around 5% for every degree of global warming that we have, as a study by german researchers revealed in 2021 (Source: https://esd.copernicus.org/articles/12/3...). Luckily, the Meterological Department can predict these floods quite accurately, as Shahriar Mojib, a Partnership Officer from the World Food Program who accompanied us throughout the trip told me.

Shahriar Mojib: "this weather prediction like comes from a number of actors there are there is one RIMES and also from the regional bureau from in Bangkok we have we use the data from the one of the European satellite company also the IMD that is the Indian Meteorological Department also the Bangladesh one so there are a number of actors and we do those cross-checks and finally it comes from another government body, the FFWC, the flood forecasting and warning center so all together in no cases it was like inaccurate whenever whenever they say it will cross the limit it crossed"

The problem then is, that while the predictions are accurate, and warnings reach the people on time, the people don't have the means to save their property from the floods, for if severe flooding occurs, their only hope is to reach government shelters, where they can only take the most essential possessions with them. In a discussion with several women who live in the Jatrapur union in the Kurigram District, they shared with me how these floods affected their lives in the past.

Translator: "she's telling that during that time she put uh to measurement how the water is increasing but there is a one they used one signal that there is a three colors already marked in a pillar that they understand when the water will come up to the green level and then this is the normal they can put uh plant the rice like this way they can eat and it is very good for the lands and theni this water will come raise more to the yellow point then it will be some more the not becoming alarming and when it will become up to the red level that means you should leave from your house she's telling like this so then when that means when they saw that the water is filled up up to the red level they leave they need to go to the shelter or cyclone center needs half an half an hour to one hour by boat half an hour to one hour okay and they have to leave but during that time the boat is not available boat is not available walk or they banana tree do you know banana tree they make some way some way to go to how can they go to the shelter they use the banana tree and make a way that they can use it they will sit on the that uh we call in bangla bangali but uh there is i don't know the uh what is called it yeah like this canoe she's telling that sometimes her children was going to fall down from the canoe and it was very dangerous for them because how they will take to all the materials to their shelter she cannot uh leave but how to save their cattle so it was uh floating away by the plan during this time, sometimes they could not get any food so uh also some their cattles uh all died and float away foreign actually, when the every year three months their uh flash flood is time is three months and during that time they lost everything uh agricultural items is destroyed and also sometimes they cannot work they cannot get food like this during that time they cannot work"

As the consequences of these floods are clearly life threatening for the affected people, aid work during and after floods is a classic case of humanitarian aid - and as Bangladesh is geographically in essence a large river delta, it is affected by these floods as a whole. That means 170 Million people are potentially in danger of such severe floods happening in a country that has only half the size of Germany. So the World Food Program utilizes different methods to save lives here, but crucially,methods which differ from the classical approach ofproviding food and shelter after a crisis hits. First and foremost is a mechanism which directly helps to prepare for the flood itself.

As Bithika Biswas, Head of the Rangpur Field Office of the World Food Program and her colleauges explain, the World Food Program is implementing forecast based financing within the Integrated Risk Managment project, whereby they select those households most vulnerable to floods and send them 4500 Taka per family if and when there is a severe flood forecast for at least three whole days, that means the families get around fifty-five Euros to buy food supplies and finance emergency measures, like raising their house or beds. As a base reference, the average monthly income in rural areas of Bangladesh was 200 Euros as of 2022 (Source: https://bbs.portal.gov.bd/sites/default/...), but in Kurigram, where these projects are implemented, 70% of people live below the poverty line (Source: https://doi.org/10.21203/rs.3.rs-3195962/v1), which means they have less than sixty euros per month. In light of that, a fifty-five euro payout to prepare for a coming flood is an important factor. The money from the forecast based financing scheme is distributed five days before the flood is supposed to happen.

The interesting - and actually completely logical - thing is, that they get the money beforehand, instead of definitely needing aid afterwards. The idea is simple: if they can use the money to move house, stockpile food or better protect their house and goods from floodwaters, they won't lose everything in the flood and can better get back on their feet after the flood. These measures are also flanked by climate risk insurance programs for store owners wares and crops, to mitigate the losses people must endure due to these climate change impacts. Humanitarian aid here means anticipating disasters and building projects to enable the people affected to prepare for them.

As one of the affected woman in Jatrapur explains here, they received the money in 2020 for the flood that occured then, and she lived on the bank of the river then, so she had to move to the flood shelter. For that she bought dry fruits to eat as well as medecine for her kids, and as the flood washed away her house, she and her children then had to live in a makeshift shelter on one of the higher roads. Without the financial aid, none of that would have been possible. To recieve the payments, the beneficaries of the programm get mobile financial services that work via sms on classic cellular phones. Just after dark in the small village, we crowded around a cellular phone while one woman showed us how the system works.i

Translator: "now she's giving yes it is working because you can see that the biggest uh send money and send money"

With this mobile service that conists of a simple menu system that allows to send certain cash amounts via sms they can pay in most local stores or get cashouts there and don't need an atm or complicated money distribution network - a relatively low-tech solution that works quickly and efficiently for the 9000 households covered by the program. Who gets selected is choosen through a combination of factors. Obviously the most flood prone regions are the determining factor, and then those families who are most vulnerable are selected, so those that don't have their own land or their own house. All of them are women that need to support their families, for the husbands often are work migrants, hunting for jobs in the larger cities, to try and support their families, an undertaking that is hard and unreliable.

As one group of women from Jatrapur point out, severe floods happen every year and they believe they need the support the World Food Program provides also for those floods, that aren't severe enough to trigger the support program, but already affect many people who do not have the means to save their belongings and livestock from the water. As of my visit in February 2024 to Kurigram, the flood trigger had only been reached during the floods of 2017 and 2020, as the Partnership Officer Shahriar Mojib from the World Food Programm confirms.

Shahriar Mojib: "It was like 2017 once and 2020 but the flood is every year the flash flood and flood is everywhere but we can only mobilize this money once it cross the yeah certain level like many of them they experienced shifting their houses like almost 10 to eight to ten times "

In light of this situation, it is no wonder that the World Food Program also tries to implement projects that will help these people in the long run, apart from giving them access to mobile money services.

One of the long term effects that they are trying to achieve, is that the locals themselves learn how and when to react to flood warnings, as Bithika Biswas, the Head of the Rangpur Field Office of the World Food Program, points out.

Bithika Biswas: "So, we do kind of training for them about their roles and responsibilities for these disaster management things and how the early warning message dissemination things. So, we do also that things also and another important thing is to disseminate early warning message to the community to the beneficiaries and we do it through the community volunteers and when the community when the union disaster management committee gets the flood forecast through the community volunteers they disseminate the message in the community in different ways using hand mics, using mosque you know mics and other ways also."

A different program, that is also part of the climate risk management that the World Food Program does in Bangladesh, is supporting income generating activities, for it is very hard to start to earn money, if people have absolutely nothing from which to start building a livelihood from, as happens after one of these floods.

Translator: "she is telling that uh she is telling that they want to make some small business so that they can take uh live in peace after also after the flood also because uh during the flood they lost everything and uh for the uh to start the new business and they uh if they have get something they can start business small business feeling very hard to maintain their family because one member is earning member"

As Sudip, who works for the NGO Good Neighbors, tells me, 70 percent of the people in this area are landless, so they can't farm. As he also points out, there are alsonot many other possible sources of income:

Sudip: "so there is there is no industries there is no very much scope to work anywhere so this is another another problem also here"

It is no wonder then, that the men from this rural region of Bangladesh, who traditionally are expected to provide for their famillies, are migrant workers. As a result, they are gone for weeks at once, sending money home occaisonally when and if they earn enough. This situation is very hard for Mussama Parpin Begum, one of the women who spoke with me in the small village in Jatrapur.

Translator: "she's telling is very hard for them because her husband is only alone and here he need to maintain everything by herself so it is difficult to maintain all the expenses only that by her husband's income "

The families here live in small, single room huts, where they also keep their livestock. Three to four huts form one complex, where one or two families which are related to one another live. The ground is packed earth, and there is a bare minimum of electricity for two to three hours in the evening for lighting and cooking. The area in the middle of the huts is a communal space for meetings, cooking and everyday chores on the hard packed mud floor. These are the poorest of the poor, and their living accomodations remind me of urban slums, interspaced with small clumps of trees and rice fields in the countryside, or packed together with small footpath sized streets at the outskirts of a small village. For Bithika Biswas it is important to point out how desperate these peoples position is, compared to other more lucky people in the region.

Bithika Biswas: "Usually our rural areas is not like that. We have spacious road, then house, separate house for each, but that area is very, you know, small, congested, narrow, narrow roads."

The solution the World Food Program is trying to implement, within this context, with their income generating activities program, is to give these people the necessary resources to establish some sort of activity which will generate enough income for them to help themselves. Small amounts of initial investment, for example for a cow, provided by the programm, enable them to then start earning money, which they can then invest in expanding their buisness. One such example, which Bithika Biswas shows us, is a woman who now has four cows stabled in a raised hut.

Bithika Biswas: "She had a desire to make something like this. She's washing the cows. And her husband works outside the area, he works in Dhaka or other districts, he's also a seasonal migrant, her husband. And you know most of the villages, most of the families, they have cows, so they have kind of awareness about the rearing things, and after that we just train them, all of them. It is important that we give them all the communication details so that they can communicate with the government people, For example, for cow rearing, we hire the government livestock officers to train them. They have some skill, they have some knowledge, but to make them more skilled, to make them more, you know, knowledge, keep them more equipped about how to take care of those things. That's why we just made the training for vaccination, for other things also. Because the traditional way, we do not care for this vaccination and this type of caring things, but with some improved skill we try to provide for them. People, they always want to know new things, so they are positive"

Another example is, that the World Food Programm equipes and trains individuals to produce compost from cow dung, which only requires some containers and the right worms as well as an understanding of the process, and enables them to sell the cow dung to farmers, allowing an extra income of roughly 23 euros per month, which helps a little to get closer too the round about 200 euros a month that a rural family in Bangladesh needs to cover regular expenses and have a healthy diet. Samsoon Nahar is one such woman who produces compost in this programm, allowing her to support herself after having left her husband. As she sieves the compost, Bithika Biswas explains the impact of such activities.

Bithika Biswas: "So this is, you know, very less industrious job and very less investment. They can get a regular profit with a very less investment regarding time, regarding materials, everything. But it's a regular production and it's very environment friendly, you know, the compost is. And the local farmers they are getting interested day by day because it is good for their cropping also, their agriculture also."

And, the compost she produces is also used in other income generating programs, like growing mushrooms in their respective huts on small sacks of compost, which is also possible with few resources - just a dark space, the compost and regular watering of the mushrooms are required. One of the women growing Mushrooms is Rashida Begum, who is mute, which makes it even more difficult to provide for herself in a community where many people can't read or write.

Bithika Biswas: "And normally what happens, you know, the differently abled people, they are treated as a burden of the family and the society, so we tried to bring them in the mainstream so that they can earn, they can contribute to the family and are not treated like a burden. initially we had to bring the mushroom spawns from Dhaka, which was time consuming and costly, now they are producing the mushroom spawns here and they sell to the other growers and like her, this lady, she just purchased this mushroom spawns from other project participants and they are just nursing, taking care of, they are just producing this here."

And it is not just mushrooms, that are now grown with the compost produced locally. A project that Bithika Biswas is also very proud of, uses the unique geography of the river to full advantage. The Brahmaputra river, due to it's frequent floods, throws up new islands and sand bars on a regular basis, sand bars which then stay for five to six years before being finally eroded by the subsequent floods.

Shahriar Mojib: "So the nature of this erosion is like that if one island is gone, you will find this-- another island has raised in some other corner of the river. It's so difficult to find these places on a map. Even in the Bay of Bengal, there are many islands you will not find it in the map or in the satellite images, because it requires a sustainable time to stay there. And then it is actually updated on the map."

As Shahriar Mojib explained to me during our drive to the banks of the Brahmaputra, these islands, these unfertile sand bars are claimed by nobody, they aren't private property. Instead they just belong to the state - a perfect situation for the people from the World Food Program, who have launched a project to cultivate pumpkins on these islands to adress the repercussions of climate change, specifically the need for income to survive ever severer floods. Bithika Biswas makes clear, that this is how to sustainably help those most affected by the floods.

Bithika Biswas: "And how we are trying to address those impacts, the sand bed cropping is one of those. Because if they can grow something during the lean period using the barren lands, unused land, then they will be equipped, I mean they will be resilient to cope the disaster period also. If they have no work, then even they have some food to their house for their own consumption and even they can sell at that time, they can earn some money."

As we cross over to the island of Bongram Char on a large open topped river boat powered by an obnoxiously loud diesel motor, Bithika Biswas explains how they organized the women from the community to grow pumpkins on this sand bar.

Bithika Biswas had read about sand bar crops from other organizations and upon seeing the sand bars in the river decided to try the same here with pumpkin, which is quite popular in Bangladesh and grows everywhere.

Bithika Biswas: "We fry it, we smash it and we cook curry with fish maybe in different ways."

Obviously, pumpkin also doesn't just grow on sand, so the compost produced from cow dung is put in a hole in the sand, and the pumkin seeds are planted there, but the stalks creep across the sand - but pumpkin requires a lot of water, making it necessary to provide some form of irrigation. So it was necessary to not only provide seeds and teach people how to plant the pumpkin amongst the sand, but also provide a water pump so that they could move enough water from the river to the fields, because the field needed to be far away from the waters edge, that it doesn't get flooded all the time. The sand bar really is a huge island, from the place where we disembarked from the boat it was a ten minute walk up the bank to the field over sand.

A pump, which was originally financed by the NGOs, moves water into large pits, where the women fetch it with buckets and water their own row of pumpkins, for each person has their own plot with one hundred plants. Each individual is responsible for their own plants, put the training they recieve is done collectively, and they rotate as night guards for the field, a duty with a very mundane reason behind it, as one of the women working in the field explains while we stand near the water pump.

Bithika Biswas: "Sometimes at night they have to check if their is some one who wants to take their stuff away"

They also contribute collectively to keep the pump running and get materials for the irrigation system. The complete operating costs for the field amount to 2000 euros a year, a very small sum, that enables the woman involved in the project to earn around 60 euros per month, making it possible for them to finance the operation themselves in the long run, and as funding for humanitarian aid projects can quickly dry up when donors focus their attention elsewhere, this is especially important. That is also why the programm includes training that aims to provide all the knowledge necessary for the women to work the field by themselves, without help, as well as all other activities above and beyond so they can support the community. Where in the beginning, people were skeptical and often forgot to water their plants, the benefits have now persuaded many more people to participate, often now helping finance the necessary material that new participants need from the income they have generated so far.

Now, they are also experimenting with cucumbers, carrots, kohlrabi and beets. From just a few people to hundreds, from dependence on aid to self-reliance. That is the process that Bithika Biswas, Head of the Rangpur Field Office of the World Food Program, describes in detail, a success that makes her very proud.

Bithika Biswas: "And this year we have also seen that people in the villages, they are just trying to utilize the badlands beside their homes, which was earlier kept unused. So it is expanding. And I am really happy that it is working. When I see the smile of the beneficiaries, I can't compare it with anything else."

The climate risk management program from the World Food Program thus transcends the classical understanding of humanitarian aid, not just adding anticipatory action to the disaster relief, but also enabling self reliance and self help on a long term basis. This is possible through the implementation of ideas that spring from the field staff that is on site, within the scope of the larger program designs that originate from the head office in Bangladesh's capital of Dhaka. The country office itself, as the press spokesperson for Germany, Martin Rentsch, from the world food program emphasizes, is quite independent.

Martin Rentsch: "because as Bithika said, they know best what's happening in the country. So I wouldn't be aware that in headquarters anyone would come up with an idea. Well, why don't you implement it in Bangladesh? That is not happening."

And obviously, the people here are not solely dependent on the World Food Program and the other international and local NGOs that work with them, the work they do is embedded in the local context, as Shahriar Mojib, the Partnership Officer of the World Food Program who accompanied this press trip to Kurigram in Bangladesh, points out:

Shahriar Mojib: "But there are other actors here. The government is here. The government-- that deputy commissioner is the head of a district. He has a pool fund. And also government has those shelter houses for the temporary location of those people. So the division of responsibilities are clearly divided. So we don't-- and we also cannot just overlap."

This division is essential to humanitarian aid and development work, as it doesn't make sense to ignore other actors already in the field. The list of who benefits from aid work is based on government lists of homeless people, of disabled people of widows and of people who are vulnerable to floods, but every case is double checked by a personal visit, sometimes leading to them finding more people that need help than originally assumed. The amount of people that require support often surpasses the capacity of the NGOs and the government, so they are forced to choose whom to support. And while the government does some thing to make it easier, like refraining from evicting landless people from government lands without due reason, the measures the government takes aren't enough to really help the citizens affected, according to Bithika Biswas.

Bithika Biswas: "We are supporting the disabled persons, the elderly persons, then for the school children, then pregnant mothers, lactating mothers. This is not possible for the government to cover all in this way. Funds, then it is, you know, human resource sometimes, logistic support sometimes. And it's news. It's not... For the government, it's, you know, it's huge people to cover. We are just piloting here with a few only. But this is not possible. So to give intensive care for all, there might be millions of this type of vulnerable people. But this is not possible for the government alone"

A fact that is the result of the economic situation of Bangladesh, as Kun Li, who works at the Bangladesh country office of the World Food Program in Bangladesh mentions.

Kun Li: "And Bangladesh is still one of the least developed countries. So the poverty is real, despite its economic growth."

But they hope that their programs will work well enough, that the government might implement similiar programs themselves, for the World Food Program is only working with 9 000 Households, a small fraction of the people who are vulnerable to floods. But regardless, the anticipatory programs they have piloted here, as an approach that has been used more and more within humanitarian aid work in recent years, has created real societal change which refugee shelters and food distribution programs never could, that is the take away that is most important for Bithika Biswas.

Bithika Biswas: "And you know our beneficiaries are the marginal segment of the community, I mean the poorest. So they were not, initially they were not treated very well or respected by the community. Other, I mean comparatively rich people. But now as they are changing their situation, their position, now they are well accepted by the othe