Ponds 'caused Bangladesh arsenic'
BBC 15 November 2009
Man-made ponds may be responsible for widespread arsenic contamination of ground water affecting millions of people in Bangladesh, a new study says.
According to the journal Nature Geoscience, the ponds have become a dumping ground for debris which releases arsenic into ground water.
Around 25m people in the country have been exposed to arsenic through water.
Experts have described the situation as the worst mass poisoning of a population in history.
Man-made ponds — often dug with the help of international aid agencies — were originally created to protects villagers from unclean water.
The arsenic enters water supplies from agricultural and industrial waste or from natural deposits in the ground.
Around two million people in Bangladesh suffer from arsenic poisoning.
Chronic ingestion of small doses has been linked to cancer of the bladder, kidney, lung or skin, while large doses can kill immediately.
Arsenic contamination of ground water is a global problem and has occurred in other countries such as Argentina, Chile, China, India, Mexico, Taiwan, Thailand and the United States.
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Millions knowingly poison themselves because no alternative water source
But the gravity of the contamination in Bangladesh is unprecedented.
Millions of Bangladeshis knowingly poison themselves because there is often no alternative water source.
Harvard scientist and co-author of the study Rebecca Neumann said that arsenic contamination could be avoided by digging deeper drinking water wells below the ponds, AFP news reported. |
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Boundaries and designations have no endorsement or acceptance by United Nations |
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Sono arsenic filter
Wikepedia 17 November 2009
The Sono arsenic filter was invented in 2006 by Abul Hussam, who is a chemistry professor at George Mason University (GMU) in Fairfax, Virginia.
It was developed to deal with the problem of arsenic contamination of groundwater.
The filter is now in use in Hussam's native Bangladesh.
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Farmers had been drinking fresh groundwater from wells, whereas previously they had had to use ponds and mudholes which were contaminated with bacteria and viruses.
However, the wells were also contaminated with naturally occurring high concentrations of poisonous arsenic, causing skin ailments and cancers. Awareness of the problem developed through the 1990s.
Allan Smith, an epidemiologist at the University of California at Berkeley, observed that the arsenic problem affects millions of people worldwide:
"You can't see it or taste or smell it.
"The idea that crystal-clear drinking water would end up causing lung disease in 20 or 30 years is a little weird.
"It's unbelievable to people.
Abul Hassam developed his filter after years of testing hundreds of prototypes.
The final version contains 20 pounds of shards of porous iron, which bonds chemically with arsenic.
It also includes charcoal, sand and bits of brick.
It filters nearly all of the arsenic from the well water.
Hassam was awarded the 2007 Grainger challenge Prize for Sustainability by the National Academy of Engineering.
Abul Hussam plans to use 70% of the $1 million engineering prize to distribute filters to needy communities.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sono_arsenic_filter |
Dissolved Arsenic in Bangladesh Drinking Water Is from Human Alteration of Landscape
ScienceDaily (Nov. 16, 2009)
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Researchers in MIT's Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering believe they have pinpointed a pathway by which arsenic may be contaminating the drinking water in Bangladesh, a phenomenon that has puzzled scientists, world health agencies and the Bangladeshi government for nearly 30 years.
The research suggests that human alteration to the landscape, the construction of villages with ponds, and the adoption of irrigated agriculture are responsible for the current pattern of arsenic concentration underground.
The pervasive incidence of arsenic poisoning in Bangladesh and its link to drinking water were first identified in the scientific literature in the early 1980's, not long after the population began switching from surface water sources like rivers and ponds to groundwater from newly installed tube wells.
That national effort to decrease the incidence of bacterial illnesses caused by contaminated drinking water led almost immediately to severe and widespread arsenic poisoning, which manifests as sores on the skin and often leads to cancers of the skin, lung, liver, bladder and pancreas.
Since then, scientists have struggled to understand how the arsenic, which is naturally occurring in the underground sediment of the Ganges Delta, is being mobilized in the groundwater.
By 2002, a research team led by Charles Harvey, the Doherty Associate Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering at MIT, had determined that microbial metabolism of organic carbon was mobilizing the arsenic off the soils and sediments, and that crop irrigation was almost certainly playing a role in the process.
But the exact sources of the contaminated water have remained elusive, until now.
In a paper appearing online in Nature Geoscience November 15, 2009, Harvey, former graduate students Rebecca Neumann and Khandakar Ashfaque and co-authors explain that ponds excavated for the purpose of providing soil to build up villages for flood protection are the source of the organic carbon that presently mobilizes the arsenic in their 6-square-mile test site.
The carbon settles to the bottom of the ponds, then seeps underground where microbes metabolize it.
This creates the chemical conditions that cause arsenic to dissolve off the sediments and soils and into the groundwater.
The researchers also found that in their test area, which is flooded by annual monsoons, the rice fields irrigated with arsenic-laden water actually serve to filter out much of the arsenic from the water system.
Charles Harvey:
"Our research shows that water from the ponds carries degradable organic carbon into the shallow aquifer.
"Groundwater flow, drawn by irrigation pumping, transports that pond water to the depth where dissolved arsenic concentrations are greatest and where it is then pumped up into the irrigation and drinking wells.
"The other interesting thing we found is that the rice fields are a sink of arsenic — more arsenic goes in with the irrigation water than comes out in the groundwater."
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Scott Fendorf, a professor at Stanford University who studies arsenic content in soils and sediments along the Mekong River in Cambodia, says Harvey's previous research, published in 2002, "transformed the scientific community's outlook on the problem."
The current work, he adds, has two big ramifications:
"It shows that human modifications are impacting the arsenic content in the groundwater; and that while the rice cropping system appears to be buffering the arsenic, the ponds excavated to provide fill to build up the villages are having a negative impact on the release of arsenic."
Neumann, now a postdoctoral associate at Harvard University, took seven trips and spent nearly a year doing fieldwork in Bangladesh, studying the hydrologic behavior and chemical nature of rice fields and ponds, and performing tests on rice field and pond waters to determine if the organic carbon in these water bodies would stimulate arsenic mobilization.
She and Ashfaque developed an understanding of the surface and underground water flow patterns over a seven-year period, using natural tracers and a 3-D model to track rice field and pond water as it traveled into and through the subsurface.
Rebecca Neumann:
"When we compared the chemical signatures of the different water sources in our study area to the signatures of the aquifer water, we saw that water with high arsenic content originates from the human-built ponds, and water with lower arsenic content originates from the rice fields.
"It's likely that these same processes are occurring at other sites, and it suggests that the problem could be alleviated by digging deeper drinking water wells below the influence of the ponds or by locating shallow drinking wells under rice fields."
The researchers suggest that irrigation wells remain at the shallow level.
At 159 million people, Bangladesh is the seventh most populous country in the world, and it is growing quickly.
That means that new tube wells and ponds are being dug every day to accommodate the growing population.
Most of those wells are being drilled to less than 100 feet.
At that depth, they draw water directly from the contaminated shallow aquifer.
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Holly Michael, a professor at the University of Delaware and former PhD student in the Harvey Lab, also studies the physics of groundwater flow and transport of the dissolved arsenic in Bangladesh, but in the deeper aquifer.
Holly Michael:
"Charlie's team is looking at the impacts at and near the surface, and my team is looking at the potential impacts of human activities at depth."
"My team found that if only the drinking-water wells are put into the deep, low-arsenic parts of the aquifer — at depths greater than 450 feet — then it is likely that the supply of low-arsenic water will continue for a very long time over much of the arsenic-affected area.
"Because so much more water is pumped for irrigation, it is important that irrigation wells are not installed deeper, as this would likely cause high-arsenic groundwater to flow downward toward the wells."
Harvey estimates that the prevalence of arsenic poisoning in Bangladesh is approximately 2 million cases and that the incidence of death from arsenic-induced cancer will rise to approximately 3,000 cases per year if consumption of contaminated water continues.
He and a team of environmental scientists and physicians are making plans for a multi-year study that would provide deep wells for two villages in Bangladesh whose inhabitants suffer from arsenic poisoning.
There they would combine continual testing of the well water and hydrogeological modeling of the groundwater system with a study of how the clean water effects the villagers' health, placing special emphasis on the neurological development of children.
Charles Harvey:
"There are all sorts of studies to show how arsenic hurts people.
"We're trying to turn it around and show how removal of the arsenic will help them."
Other co-authors on the paper are graduate student Julie Shoemaker, who helped with fieldwork, sample analysis and data synthesis, and Bangladeshis A.B.M. Badruzzaman and M. Ashraf Ali of the Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology, who provided logistical support for the field site in the Munshiganj district of Bangladesh.
Adapted from materials provided by Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering
via EurekAlert!, a service of AAAS.
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Eleven years old Jainal
Has been working in factory for three years |
Golden opportunity missed to reform banking sector |
by Julie Clothier/AFP November 15, 2009 A better, more inclusive global banking system was possible, one that lends money to poorest of the poor who lack collateral to secure credit, Nobel laureate Muhammad Yunus said Dhaka: Bangladesh’s “banker to the poor” says the world has missed a golden opportunity to help the neediest people on the planet with a redesign of the financial system in the wake of the global economic crisis. Nobel laureate Muhammad Yunus, who along with his Grameen Bank won the peace prize in 2006, said leaving the world’s banking system in more or less the same state would not help the poor.
“This was the greatest opportunity we ever had to redesign the financial system globally and totally,” the 69-year-old told AFP.
“But now we’ve gone back to the same old ways and we’ll be ready for another crisis because we didn’t fix anything that is missing.”
Yunus, who created a billion-dollar micro-credit venture by lending $27 to a group of village women in 1976, has been a vocal critic of the global banking system which he says deliberately excludes people.
He said a better, more inclusive global banking system was possible, one that lends money to poorest of the poor who lack collateral to secure credit.
“First we need to redesign the financial system to make it an inclusive system. Every person in the world will have easy access to this system. Grameen has proved that it can be done,” he said. “Secondly we have to make sure (the banking sector) never has to come back for taxpayers’ bailouts for their mistakes.”
Many of world’s leading banks faced collapse in late 2008 due to ill-judged investments in loss-making financial instruments, leading governments in the US and Europe to pump billions into the sector.
Many of the same banks have since reported huge profits despite the government bailouts and critics are now wondering what has changed in the aftermath of the worst financial crisis since the 1930s.
Copyright © 2009 HT Media All Rights Reserved |
Muhammad Yunus: Changing the System, One Social Business at a Time September 24, 2009 Brevy Cannon UVA Today excerpts Ideas can start small and go on to change the world.
Starting with a $27 loan to 42 Bangladeshi villagers in 1976, Yunus founded a bank that now makes more than $1 billion a year in 'microloans' to 8 million borrowers.
Further, Yunus' concept of collateral-free microloans has become a global movement that has dispersed more than $20 billion to nearly 100 million households in more than 50 countries, said Gowher Rizvi of the US University of Virginia as he introduced his longtime friend Yunus.
The magnitude of microfinance's impact is staggering, Rizvi said.
Millions of the poorest people in the world, many of whom earn less than $1 a day, have used microloans to start household ventures as simple as buying one chicken and selling the eggs.
Microloans also pay for schooling that allows children to become engineers, doctors and other professionals, a huge leap in one generation from the circumstances of their parents.
"Availability of affordable and reliable credit offers the best hope of breaking the vicious circle of economic, social and demographic structure that ultimately cause poverty," said Rizvi in his introduction of "one of the most transformative human beings on our earth."
Yunus recounted the birth and epic growth of the simple concept of microloans.
Shortly after Bangladesh became an independent country in 1971, Yunus left his job as a professor of economics in the United States to help rebuild his homeland.
When a famine struck, Yunus witnessed people dying and felt "disgusted and tortured inside," he recounted. |
Alamin |
Changing the System, One Social Business at a Time
September 24, 2009 Brevy Cannon UVA Today excerpts When Muhammad Yunus visited struggling villages to help in whatever small ways he could, he soon observed how many Bangladeshis were suffering at the hands of loan sharks. His initial $27 loan allowed the 42 Bangladeshi villagers to pay off their loan sharks. After observing the huge positive impact of his first few small-dollar loans, he asked banks to help him multiply these collateral-free loans. Bankers' conventional wisdom held that the poor were not creditworthy, and should not be given loans. Yunus personally signed as a guarantor of every tiny loan to villagers, and the loans were repaid successfully. Still, the banks declined to adopt and promote this new type of loan, so Yunus founded Grameen Bank in 1976, to make his own microloans. Grameen Bank has grown to become one of the largest in the world, lending more than $1 billion a year to 8 million borrowers, with a 97 percent payback rate. In the process, Yunus upended many of the tenets of modern banking. Whereas typical banks tend to lend to the rich, mostly men, concentrated in urban centers, drawing on the deposits of wealthy investors, Grameen loans to the poor, mostly women, often in rural areas, with 60 percent of their deposits coming from borrowers (who must open a Grameen account as part of getting a loan.) Instead of making customers travel to a bank branch to do business, Grameen's 28,000 staff come to the doorsteps of its customers. |
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All humans have an entrepreneurial spirit, Yunus noted, but that spirit is stifled when people are born into a society that doesn't let every individual have an opportunity to explore his or her potential.
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Changing the System, One Social Business at a Time September 24, 2009 Brevy Cannon UVA Today excerpts |
"Poverty is not created by poor people. Poverty is created by the system," Muhammad Yunus said.
To demonstrate this claim, Yunus created a special program of loans to beggars, who were encouraged to carry along something to sell, like candy, while begging.
Those they approached had a choice to buy something, donate or do both.
Today more than 112,000 beggars have received these loans, and more than 16,000 of them are no longer begging.
The rest are only part-time beggars, exercising their entrepreneurial spirit as they determine which houses are best for begging and which are best for selling, he said to a laugh.
"So even a beggar, given an opportunity, can turn himself or herself into something else: a self-respecting businessperson."
Detractors have been skeptical that the microloans model could work in wealthy developed nations like the United States, Yunus said.
So Grameen has opened a branch in Queens, New York; its roughly 1,000 borrowers have a repayment rate of 99.3 percent.
But expanding microloan offerings in the U.S. and many other countries is hobbled by old banking laws that technically prohibit this type of small-dollar lending and community banking.
Mainstream banks continue to resist the microloans model, Yunus said.
The recent financial crisis is an opportunity to remake the international banking system, so that it will serve the two-thirds of the world's population who have traditionally been denied access to the formal banking system.
Returning to the old banking system would be a huge missed opportunity, Yunus said, but there is still time to reform the system.
Yunus has also pioneered the concept of social entrepreneurship, or social business, a not-for-profit business focused on doing a social good, such as ending the serious malnutrition suffered by 50 percent of Bangladeshi children.
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To do so, Grameen Bank partnered with Dannon to produce low-cost yogurt fortified with a special blend of nutrients and vitamins lacking in the diets of the malnourished.
When a child consumes two cups of the yogurt a week for eight to nine months, he or she gains the missing micronutrients required for healthy development, Yunus said.
The "profits" from this program are reinvested to reach more and more children each year. |
Muhammad Yunus: Changing the System, One Social Business at a Time
September 24, 2009 Brevy Cannon UVA Today excerpts
Similar Grameen joint-venture social businesses are making low-cost mosquito nets impregnated with insecticide to prevent the spread of mosquito-borne illnesses like malaria, and shoes that will sell for $1 a pair, to be unveiled at the July 2010 World Cup soccer finals.
Social business enables people to use their creativity to solve problems and express their selfless side, Yunus said.
Just like his own experience creating micro-lending, the solutions can start small, and then be replicated around the world.
"We can change the world," Yunus said, to another standing ovation.
MuhammadYunus.org |
Roubel |
Muhammad Yunus: Capitalism is Half-Baked By Michael Fitzgerald January 9th, 2008 excerpts
In “Creating a World Without Poverty,” Muhammad Yunus has written a dangerous book.
Not so much for his goal – that’s merely outlandish, since most people expect the poor will always be.
Besides, Yunus knows how to make audacious ideas real — he created Grameen Bank to bring financial services to the poor, and proved that microfinance can be profitable and powerful.
What’s dangerous are his questions.
Like, if capitalism is so effective, why must 60 percent of the world’s population squeak by on six percent of its income?
Why is it that China’s remarkable economic growth is ruining its environment?
Why is poverty on the rise in the United States, even as its overall wealth skyrockets?
These questions skewer conventional economic wisdom that our current model of capitalism is the be-all and end-all for global economics.
Yunus dares to say that market capitalism is both underdeveloped and, in its current form, bad for most of us.
He echoes J.A. Hobson, the early 20th century critic of capitalism whose 1902 book Imperialism skewered British capitalists, accusing them of being economic parasites.
(He also echoes Adam Smith himself, who wrote in the Wealth of Nations about inequities in the system that reduced competition and the flow of labor).
Yunus is not so vituperative as Hobson, but he does call out business leaders, saying bluntly that “capitalism is a half-developed structure” and that modern economics is guilty of
We’ve created a one-dimensional human
...assuming that people are one-dimensional beings concerned only with the pursuit of maximum profit...
We’ve created a one-dimensional human being to play the role of business leader, the so-called entrepreneur.
We’ve insulated him from the rest of life, the religious, emotional, political and social.
He is dedicated to one mission only – maximize profit.
He is supported by other one-dimensional human beings who give him their investment money to achieve that mission.
To quote Oscar Wilde, they know the price of everything and the value of nothing.
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Yunus believes that governments, nonprofit organizations, international organizations like the World Bank and attempts at corporate social responsibility all have failed to address the problems of modern free-market capitalism.
What he posits is a new form of business, which he calls the social business.
He describes this business as similar in every way to a normal profit-oriented business, except that it does not disburse its profits to investors.
It also exists to address a social issue (he suggests examples such as a business that might make nutritious food at low prices for poor children, that would not require expensive packaging and would only have to make profits enough to stay in business).
There will obviously be limits to the investment pool available to social businesses.
But examples of them already exist – Grameen Bank and its affiliates, to name the obvious, but there are already perhaps scores of others.
Yunus expects to see social businesses find wide sources of funding and management:
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Muhammad Yunus: Capitalism is Half-Baked By Michael Fitzgerald January 12th and 21st, 2008 excerpts
Grameen Bank is an improbable business worth study.
In the second section of Creating a World Without Poverty, Muhammad Yunus details the ongoing evolution of what he calls “The Grameen Experiment.”
Yunus was an economist, not a banker, and he needed to invent his bank for the poor, ignoring naysayers and regulatory obstacles at almost every step.
It’s a classic example of how someone who does not realize that what he intends to do is impossible is thus able to achieve it.
Economists may find themselves frowning in this section of the book.
Yunus tweaks his former colleagues for their blind spots and their refusal to look at people except in abstract terms like “labor.”
His is another voice in favor of ‘experimental’ economics, the part of the field that tries to look at human behavior as it is, rather than as economists say it should be.
That kind of anthropological economics resulted in many useful business practices at Grameen, and Yunus is generous in discussing what has worked and what has needed revising.
For instance, it found that the wisdom of crowds works among the very poor: it has learned to lend to people in groups of five, and they all have to vouch for the person receiving the loan.
It’s also learned that lending to women has a bigger potential for getting families out of poverty than lending to men.
Grameen is also of interest because it has spawned 25 different kinds of social businesses.
Yunus details some of them in this section and then walks us through the newest, Grameen Danone, a joint venture between Grameen and France’s Danone Group (in the U.S. we know it best for Dannon yogurt).
This venture is a ground-breaking social business that now sells very inexpensive yogurt to help feed Bangladeshi children.
In his two chapters on the creation of what he hopes will be a trendsetting operation, some of what Yunus looks at focuses on how a very large corporation was able to shift its own mindset about things like manufacturing, distribution and packaging in ways that may help its regular business.
Grameen’s creativity and ability to change minds and remake both markets and government regulation is strikingly evident in this section.
So is its ability to listen to its customers and adapt to them, rather than forcing them to adapt to it.
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Yunus recaps some of the hoops that had to be jumped through before Grameen Danone could start making high-nutrition, low-cost yogurt in Bangladesh.
Capital markets and regulators aren’t set up to finance social businesses or to tax them (or exempt them from taxes, as may be the case), and Group Danone had to do yeoman’s work with shareholders and regulators, including creating a social mutual fund that did not promise to maximize returns first and foremost.
Yunus' goal is to expand market capitalism by making the unconventional conventional, working in an idea for a Social Dow Jones Index, Social MBAs and other ideas for increasing the visibility – and viability — of such businesses.
He also has high expectations for turning information technology as an engine for eliminating poverty. His experiences in Bangladesh suggest that the digital divide is not inevitable, and where it exists it does not need to be permanent.
He cites the One Laptop Per Child and Intel Classmate PC projects as examples, and throws out a few other ideas that he hopes someone will pursue.
Yunus’ vision will either inspire or irritate, because it is an outsized vision – a world with no poverty, a capitalism that doesn’t weigh only profits – that stands outside today’s reality.
It will make many business people uncomfortable, and many others disdainful.
By the end of the book, when he discusses the consumer society and whether it can and should be sustained, and says not in its current form, he will be preaching to a choir, and also to converts.
They will all nod their heads in agreement when he writes
“Doing the right thing is no longer merely a matter of making ourselves feel good.
“It’s a matter of survival, for ourselves and for generations to come.”
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Children workers — Sweat shops — Unions Funding Sweatshops Globally G8 Will Not Ease Third World Poverty |
Democracy and children Child labor Kyrgyz Peru India Bangladesh Indonesia Morocco Africa |
Hunger, children, animals dying AIDS killing |
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