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| Bangladesh. Flooded village south of Dacca. With 850 inhabitants per square kilometer (2,200 per square mile), Bangladesh is the most densely populated nation in the world, three times more so than India and seven time more than China. It is also one of the poorest countries, with GNP of $260 per inhabitant. Situated on a very fertile but extremely low-lying deltaic plain with some 300 waterways flowing through it, Bangladesh has always had to face up to the devastating flood waters of the great Himalayan rivers, the Ganges and Brahmaputra. During the summer monsoon it is not unusual for two-thirds of the country to be under water. The flooding has become more serious as a result of the deforestation of the Himalayas, notably in Nepal. Agriculture, on which four-fifths of the population depends for a living, has reduced the vegetation cover (which used to limit the extent of floods) to less than 10 percent. Every year these floods claim numerous lives and render one-quarter of the population homeless. The worse disasters, such as those in 1970 and 1991, occur when cyclones pass through accompanied by extremely high tides, resulting in several hundred thousand deaths. Bangladesh is at particularly high risk from the increasing frequency of tropical storms and slow rise in sea level that are accompanying global climate change. |
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