Salt water tears

“Every ecosystem has its fragile balance. That much we have already learnt. Scientists routinely now seek to document the excesses that will lead to imbalance, even where they can do nothing about them. And sometimes, just sometimes, legislation and implementation and eventually protection may follow.� Francis Hodgson

The Prix Pictet Executive Stephen Barber Group Managing Director Pictet & Cie Director of the Prix Pictet Michael Benson Director, Candlestar Ltd Secretary of the Prix Pictet and Prix Pictet Ltd Francis Hodgson Head of Photographs, Sotheby’s Chairman of Judges Leo Johnson Sustainability Adviser

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording or any other information storage and retrieval system, without prior consent in writing from the publisher. All image rights reside with the artists and their agents.

ISBN 9780955866135 The Prix Pictet Ltd Candlestar 8 Hammersmith Broadway LondonW6 7AL www.prixpictet.com © Prix Pictet Ltd All pictures © Munem Wasif - VU’ Munem Wasif is represented worldwide by Agence VU’ Designed by Webb & Webb Design, London Printed in England by Empress Litho

SALT WATER TEARS: LIVES LEFT BEHIND IN SATKHIRA, BANGLADESH

munem wasif

Munem Wasif: Tiny Truths, Big Truths Every ecosystem has its fragile balance. That much we have already learnt. Scientists routinely now seek to document the excesses that will lead to imbalance, even where they can do nothing about them.

And sometimes, just sometimes, legislation and implementation and eventually protection may follow.

In the far south-west of Bangladesh, Munem Wasif shows us just what these abstract-sounding paradigms mean in practice. Nobody knows certainly why the water levels are changing in the Bay of Bengal, but they are. In a famously low-lying country, more and more people are under threat of catastrophic flooding.

Coastal erosion, too, is accelerating, a matter of grave concern in a country where (under the pressure of population) every inch of usable land is at a premium.

Munem Wasif found a region where changes to a single measurable fact – salinity levels in the water table – can be seen to have affected every part of the matrix of balances. Salinity has risen. The old agriculture is no longer possible because the old plants simply can’t grow. Shrimping – a new industry – has grown up, largely for export, using fewer workers and threatening the livelihood of many others. Shrimping in turn exposes more land to salt or brackish water. Farmers are reduced to occasional labour. Established structures of work and the societies centred on work change and break down. Many people have to venture into 2

the mangrove swamps of the Sundarbans (a national park on the Indian side of the border, but not yet on the Bangladeshi) to fish or to collect roofing materials which used to be available closer to hand. In the Sundarbans they are exposed to a terrifying catalogue of risk, including attack from dog sharks, crocodiles, king cobras and the Bengal tiger. Women (it’s always the women) have to go ever farther in search of fresh water. New diseases become frequent, obviously connected to all these changes, but not yet provably so. So it goes on, a kaleidoscope of interconnected shifts, not fully understood, and not half predictable with accuracy.

Munem Wasif has not gone to this blighted region to show us the abstractions of climate-change experts or the theories of macro-economists. Photography deals in the particular, and this project deals in the very particular. Wasif is himself Bangladeshi. Not for him the flak-jacket, the adrenaline rush, and five hours in the red zone. These are his people, although not quite in his part of the country. The accent is different but the language is shared. Wasif in fact rented a motorcycle to complete this commission, and when he tells you the names of the people in the pictures it’s because he met them and heard them, and knew them a little.

The pictures, then, are almost by definition subjective. Too much ink has been spilt trying to work out when and whether photographers tell the truth. These pictures are absolutely personal to Wasif, absolutely his expression of his sentiments. But that doesn’t stop them being also a remarkable – and true – document of what is happening in the interplay of some of the complex of variables in this corner of

Shrimp are for sale in a local market. Shamnogor, Satkhira.

Bangladesh. Photography reads big and small. Wasif shows you Johura Begum’s long arm reaching out to her husband as he dies of cancer of the liver, that simple tenderness is the only available healthcare in a village whose population are in desperate need. It’s a

little tiny truth, certainly. The husband died, the woman lived on, widowed. The photographer was there, he knows. But it is also and at the same time a complex of many metaphors. There are many pictures like this because this scene has been played out so many times

all over the world. It’s a picture ‘about’ infrastructure and financing, too, as well as morality and ethics. In another searing picture, containers of fresh water are dragged on foot in boats through clinging sterile mud.

Shajhan Shiraj and his brothers from Gabura, we’re

told, travel three hours in this kind of way every day.

Stunted trees, clear water only in the distance, three men, three boats, and the keel-trail they etch in the mud. It’s not just a beautiful picture: the irony of boats travelling so painfully slowly by land with water as their only cargo is unimaginably painful.

There is a powerful crossover in the way pictures work. Read these pictures only as little truths and they will wrench out your heart. Read them as big truths and they will drive you towards planning practical effort for change. You don’t need to know that Johura Begum’s husband was called Amer Chan to be moved to action by Wasif.

We read about donor fatigue, compassion fatigue.

Every viewer of these pictures will have at some point the sense of having seen them before. Salgado in the Sahel, just as shocking, maybe more. Very similar in feel and tonality. But it is not up to the photographers to provide us with new scenes. As long as those scenes are there and look the way they do, photographers will continue to show them to us. Some people will look at Wasif’s pictures here and call them derivative, and they’ll be right. But it isn’t fashion. There is not going to be a new length of trousers this season in the liver cancer business. Photographers can only do so much.

If viewers are tired of being harrowed, tired of seeing these scenes one shouldn’t have to look at, perhaps we can understand that it’s the viewers who need to perk up their ideas, not the photographers. Munem Wasif, for one, is doing his bit. Now it’s up to us.

Francis Hodgson Head of Photographs, Sotheby’s Chairman of Judges, Prix Pictet 3

Munem Wasif: an Elegy to Indifference There are layers to climate change denial. Layer one is the science it’s not happening.

Layer two is causation it may be happening but its natural. Layer three is the response it’s too late to do anything. Layer four is the unsayable. It’s happening. We could do something. But frankly the impacts are going to be felt elsewhere. The cost-benefit just doesn’t stack up.

And this is the reality. 97% of natural disaster related deaths over the period of 1990-1998 were in emerging markets. Climate change, the product of the rich, is going, disproportionately, to impact the poor. And the developed nations’ response, if the absence of binding and substantive commitments to reduce emissions reductions is any evidence, is dispassion.

Munem Wasif is from Bangladesh. The scenes he depicts are of his people confronting not just climate change but the impacts of it on a water resource already contaminated by salinity and arsenic. What you expect, what you visualise in advance, are the images that puncture that indifference, where the artist’s understanding of the subjects allows him to bring them to life and share their pain authentically with the viewer.

These are the images we expect. These are the images we are conditioned to discard. Wasif has done something different. What he has offered to us in this series is a gaze that is without apparent register atonal on the topic of grief, neutral on the subject of child mortality. What he has offered, in other words, is not just his gaze. It is also a rendering, in its dispassion, of ours. And the cumulative force of the images is this, not just to evoke our response but to awaken us to a harder reality, the fact that we do not respond.

Munem Wasif

Munem Wasif was born in Bangladesh in 1983. A graduate of Pathshala, Wasif started his photographic career as a feature photographer for the Daily Star, a leading English daily in Bangladesh. His photographs have been published in numerous national and international publications including Le Monde, Himal Southasian, Asian Geographic, Photo District News, Zonezero, PDFX12 and Daily Star.

In 2007, he was selected for the World Press Photo Joop Swart Masterclass in the Netherlands. He won an “Honorable Mention” in the All Roads Photography Program by the National Geographic Society for his extensive work on Old Dhaka. His work has been exhibited worldwide at many important events and galleries including the Anchor Photo Festival in Cambodia, the International Photography Biennial of the Islamic World, Iran, Fotofreo - the Austalian festival of photography, the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography in Japan and the Getty Image Gallery in England. He was recently elected as one of the 30 emerging photographers by Photo District News, USA. In 2008 he received the F25 Prize from La Fabrica and the City of Perpignan Young Reporter Award at the occasion of Visa pour l’Image festival. He was awarded the 2008 Prix Pictet Commission.

Munem Wasif has been a Member of the Paris-based agency Agence VU’ since April 2008.

Leo Johnson Sustainability Adviser

A child sleeps alone as the mother collects water for dinner.

Ashasuni, Satkhira.

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Salty Tears for the End of ‘Public Water’ Rippling sea waves, dried river skeletons and endless fields.

Water everywhere…

Sharoshoti Munda and Rubala Munda are waiting for their pitchers to be filled with water from the only filters in the area. They had to stand in a queue for hours like hundreds of others. Patrakhola, Satkhira.

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Each family needs about six pitchers of fresh water a day. They have to walk seven miles to get it, ignoring knee-deep mud in the rainy season, and braving the biting cold of winter. In the seventeen sub-districts of southwestern Bangladesh, the normal flow of water has been staunched and all that remains is a salty, rotten corpse. Shrimp farming has choked off the very foundation of coastal agriculture. The land, birds, fish, insects, everything has been swept away by the tyranny of brackish water.

The historic relationship between life and water has been ignored by destructive agricultural and fishing practices that take no regard of the knowledge or needs of local people. Starting in 1974, the saline levels of this land increased by a multiple of six within two decades. The State’s development policy has always treated this region, adjacent to the Bay of Bengal and Sunderban (the largest mangrove forest in the world), as marginal and unworthy. But even in a neglected condition, the region is an important source of remittance to the national treasury. This is also the area that protects geographic frontiers, absorbing the full brunt of calamities like Cyclone Sidr.

In the 1980s, water was sealed off into enclosures, so that commercial shrimp farming could begin. A 1994 government order, arbitrarily passed without discussion, declared the entire coast available for shrimp farming. Farmers were ousted from their land, becoming internal refugees who turn to day labour.

Men and women had numerous occupations in the old marshland. But now, only a few people are needed for shrimp farming.

Once, local plants such as Beulo, Chhamna, Bhotka, Narargoaj, Chechoa, and Kachury would rot in the rainy season and mix with the earth thus ensuring a rich diversity of plants and crops. But the beginning of the end was the so-called green revolution, invented by the International Rice Research Institute and CGIR. Hybrid seeds and high yield Ufshi rice flexed commercial muscle, ousting local rice varieties. Shrimp farming followed, bleeding the ploughing lands and permanently destroying the fish habitat. Bowal, Bain, Beley, Mourala, Shol, Koi, Chang, Betla, Falui and many other species of fish faced extinction from the brine onslaught.

Shedding their memories like feathers, the local birds flew away forever. Once famous for quality dairy products like sweets, curds, ghee, the entire area is now devoid of livestock.

In the southwest region, the air is heavy with brine. The entire shrimp enclosure area is becoming unbearably hot. In the summer days, sweat vanishes, leaving white marks from dry salt on skin. Tigers find forests empty of food and are forced to enter human localities. People from the forest are fleeing to the towns, to the unknown, all in search of work. The Farakka Dam in the upstream area has accelerated the invasion of salt and silt, damaging the mangrove forest itself. The Sundari trees that give the forest its name are dying. The Shulo, a unique forest specimen, cannot reach the dazzle of sunlight because of muddy water.

Six million people are going through a disaster caused by lack of fresh water. But shops are selling bottled water along with soft drinks. It seems there

will be no fresh water for public use, except in bottles manufactured by corporations like Vivendi, Thames, Ondeo, Pepsico, Kona Nigari and others. Water is a crucial political commodity which can be used to control a State and its people. There is no end to World Bank, Asian Development Bank and donor funded water projects, but the knowledge, decisions or demands of local people are never considered in these mega projects.

Yet the people continue their historic struggle for survival even in midst of devastation. They do so by adopting indigenous methods, such as preserving rainwater, filtering water or collecting the flow of fresh water. They devote prayers to local mythical figures like Khowaz Khizir, saint of water; Ganga, goddess of the river; and Bonbibi, protector of the forest. In local philosophies there are also embedded clues to ways in which the lost resources of fresh water might be regained. In a changing climate world, we must pay heed to the alternative knowledge and perspective of indigenous people. Water is not just an unquestionable commodity, but also a part of living. Until the State can recognise water as life, the practice of destroying fresh water will continue and people’s sovereign rights over water will not be established.

Pavel Partha Translated by Naeem Mohaiemen

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Above: Aged 65, Aiyub Ali rises early to pray before a full day loading the boat with Golpata. Sunderban, Satkhira.

Right: A collector drags Golpata, cut from deep in the Mangrove forest, back to the boat. Sunderban, Satkhira.

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A father, son, and uncle cast their net to catch fish at dawn.

Sunderban, Satkhira.

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Golpata collectors settle after work in the middle of the river near Sunderban. Increased salinity from shrimp cultivation has forced traditional fishermen to abandon their families and seek a long term livelihood in Sunderban. Sunderban, Satkhira.

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Above: Hiromunda was a farmer, cultivating his own plot of land. Encroaching shrimp farms have left him unable to feed his family. Patrakhola, Satkhira.

Right: Young children look for small fish in the mud. Vamia, Satkhira.

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The land bears the footprints of each of the women journeying for water.

Patrakhola, Satkhira.

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Increased salinity in water turned fertile lands into barren grounds. A ruin of an old tree trunk is left as evidence of past glory. Ashasuni, Satkhira.

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Above: Voddori Munda (55) waits beside an empty pitcher for her daughterin-law to return with water. Kashipur, Satkhira.

Right: Shajhan Siraj and his brothers push boats through low tide into the sea. The boats are filled with fresh water which they have collected inland.

It takes the brothers up to three hours to make the journey each day.

Datinakhali, Satkhira.

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A boat sits idle on land barren and cracked from salinity. Gabura, Satkhira.

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Durgabadda Mondol (50) is the sole earner of the family. He and his family have been suffering from numerous diseases during the past few months.

His daughter-in-law, unwell, sits outside in the sun. Chuna, Satkhira.

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Johura Begum’s husband, Amer Chan (60), is suffering from liver cancer.

She has succeeded in bringing home water. Patrakhola, Satkhira.

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High salinity levels in the water have affected health. Amer Chan (60) is suffering from liver cancer. He is resting on a jute mat in his clay hut.

Patrakhola, Satkhira.

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School attendance is reduced by the daily need to help mothers collect drinking water. Shawkat nogor, Satkhira.

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A woman collects drinking water for her family from a sweet-water pond. Her two hour journey needs to be performed twice a day. Bolabaria, Satkhira.

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A mother grieves as her child lapses into unconsciousness. The tumour on her child’s back has worsened. Her husband is fishing and will not return that day.

Chuna, Satkhira.

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The woman’s day is principally organised around the task of providing water.

Bolabaria, Satkhira.

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Above: A mother rests with her daughter. Kashipur, Satkhira.

Right: Joya Rani Sanal has developed a method of collecting rainwater in polythene bags. She and her family will be able to survive six months with this water. Bolabaria, Satkhira.

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Above: Sorifa Khatun (30) rocks one of her seven children to sleep. Her husband, Kased Mali, was killed by a tiger six months ago. Gabura, Satkhira.

Left: Cows paddle through water in search of pasture. Bolabaria, Satkhira.

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Afterword The Partners of Pictet & Cie are delighted to be able to support this series of remarkable photographs of the Satkhira district in south-western Bangladesh by the outstanding photographer, Munem Wasif. Wasif is, as it happens, from Bangladesh himself, and was one of the eighteen photographers shortlisted for the Prix Pictet in 2008.

As an integral element of the prize, Pictet decided to commission one of the shortlisted artists to record a water-related project that was being supported by the Bank. The project selected was the Chittagong Hill Tracts project in Bangladesh, managed by the UK-based charity, WaterAid. The project focuses on gravity flow schemes as an innovative, but scalable approach to the problems of salination, arsenic contamination and lack of sanitation, by tapping safe water at its source in the hills and piping it to villages below.

Regrettably, because of the deteriorating security situation in the Chittagong Hills, Wasif was unable to visit the area of the project. Instead, he has made two separate, ten-day, visits to the Satkhira district to document the effects of rising salinity levels on the lives of the people there.

The result of this commission is, I hope you will agree, a profoundly moving, yet stark documentation of the daily struggle to sustain life because of the impact of unsustainable human activities on the local environment. But I also hope that these photographs will, as Kofi Annan concluded in his Prix Pictet address last October, “act as a source of inspiration to governments, to business, and to all of us as individuals, to step up to the challenge and support change for a sustainable world.”

China India Bangladesh Satkhira

Indian Ocean

Bangladesh and the Satkhira region.

Ivan Pictet Managing Partner, Pictet & Cie

WaterAid is a leading independent organisation that enables the world’s poorest people to gain access to safe water, sanitation and hygiene education.

WaterAid has been in Bangladesh since 1986, working with 21 local partners to improve access to water supply and sanitation services for poor communities.

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A quest for water. Bolabaria, Satkhira.

The Prix Pictet The Prix Pictet, the world’s first prize dedicated to photography and sustainability, has a unique mandate – to use the power of photography to communicate vital messages to a global audience. It is a unique goal – art of the highest order, applied to confront the pressing social and environmental challenges of the new millennium.

In 2008 the theme of the Prize was ‘water’. For the 2009 prize, over seventy nominators from six continents have begun the search to identify the image, or set of images, that will have the power and artistic quality to convey this year’s theme of ‘earth’. ‘Earth’ refers to the planet and the soil beneath our feet, and to the marks that man makes on the face of the land - either direct impacts such as mines, toxic waste, vast refuse dumps and blasted desert landscapes; or indirect ones - the scars left by fire, flood or famine and to the impact of natural disasters: earthquakes, landslides and volcanoes.

The inaugural Prix Pictet was won by the Canadian photographer Benoit Aquin for his series of photographs of the Chinese Dust Bowl. The winner of this year’s CHF100,000 Prix Pictet will be announced in October 2009. One of the shortlisted photographers will be invited to complete a commission to record a sustainability project supported by Pictet & Cie. Proceeds from the sale of this catalogue will be used to support the selected project.

Acknowledgements: I would like to thank Shahidul Alam and Stephen Mayes who nominated me for this award. Thanks to WaterAid Bangladesh (Khairul vhi, Hasin Apa, Salahuddin vhi) and Shushilan (Rafiq vhi) for giving me their support, without them my work would not have been possible. Thanks to Mahtab vhi, Joyonto Da, Mizan vhi, Saiful vhi, Sultan vhi for driving me on a motorbike mile after mile in Satkhira. Thanks to Mizan vhi for walking with me in deep forest in Sunderban, forgetting the dangers of the tiger. Thanks to Pavel Partha for the strong text, and Naeem and Seuty for the translation. Thanks to VU’ and of course Marc.

Thanks to Prix Pictet and Pictet & Cie for their commitment and enabling me to photograph this project.

Munem Wasif Dhaka, February 2009

The Prix Pictet Executive Stephen Barber Group Managing Director Pictet & Cie Director of the Prix Pictet Michael Benson Director, Candlestar Ltd Secretary of the Prix Pictet and Prix Pictet Ltd Francis Hodgson Head of Photographs, Sotheby’s Chairman of Judges Leo Johnson Sustainability Adviser

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording or any other information storage and retrieval system, without prior consent in writing from the publisher. All image rights reside with the artists and their agents.

ISBN 9780955866135 The Prix Pictet Ltd Candlestar 8 Hammersmith Broadway LondonW6 7AL www.prixpictet.com © Prix Pictet Ltd All pictures © Munem Wasif - VU’ Munem Wasif is represented worldwide by Agence VU’ Designed by Webb & Webb Design, London Printed in England by Empress Litho

“Every ecosystem has its fragile balance. That much we have already learnt. Scientists routinely now seek to document the excesses that will lead to imbalance, even where they can do nothing about them. And sometimes, just sometimes, legislation and implementation and eventually protection may follow.� Francis Hodgson