A Dramatic ‘Rescue’ Portends New Calamity : Bangladesh: Poverty, not flooding, is the main problem. So aid shouldn’t be wasted on costly and inefficient embankments.

A significant transaction between the First World and the Third World will take place in London this week.

The subject will be the floods that devastated Bangladesh in 1987 and 1988. Last July in Paris, Presidents George Bush and Francois Mitterrand and other leaders of the industrialized world asked the World Bank for a plan to reduce Bangladesh’s flood vulnerability. That was the impetus for the meeting. The problem, however, does not lend itself to easy solutions.

In those years, Bangladesh’s floods were very serious. Millions of people were driven from their homes, and 1,000 to 3,000 died. American television showed unforgettable scenes of Bangladeshi mothers holding their infants above the muddy floodwater as they sought relief.

However, careful analysis in subsequent months put the floods in context. This delta territory has known floods for millennia, and its people have many time-tested defenses. Despite the dramatizing power of television, floods are simply not the greatest threat to security and greater prosperity for Bangladesh.

The moderate monsoon flooding of a normal year is indispensable to agriculture and fisheries. Although the high floods of ’87 and ’88 destroyed rice in the fields, they left extra water in the soil for intensified second plantings. Food-grain production for these years was normal or above. Contrary to much understandable anxiety, no trend of worsening floods has been observed.

Unlike drought, which leaves people truly helpless, flood losses can be greatly reduced by traditional and modern readiness. Constructing protective dikes around cities, providing longer warnings and building elevated havens are clearly in order and should be vigorously pursued. Abundant international aid funds are available for such measures.

The experts’ consensus was that Bangladesh should follow this moderate strategy of flood management. It should keep its main developmental focus on its primary needs: slowing rapid population growth, increasing literacy and fostering more irrigated and modernized rice farming in the long, sunny dry season, when the fields are traditionally fallow.

However, Bangladesh’s Water Development Board--and its hundreds of engineers--wants to raise earthen embankments up to 20 feet in height for hundreds of miles along the great Ganges and the Brahmaputra rivers. There is serious doubt whether embankments can resist the mighty rivers in a sudden, fast-rising flood.

Without supplementary works, in most years they would obstruct normal flows critical to growing rice and fish, the people’s food staples. Early cost projections for the embankments, almost certainly underestimated, are $6 billion over several years.

This approach is curiously supported by France. By chance, Danielle Mitterrand, wife of the French president, was in Bangladesh’s capital of Dhaka during the 1988 flood, and France thereafter sent 30 engineers to study embankments. President Mitterrand has made saving Bangladesh from floods a centerpiece of his otherwise commendable drive to increase aid from the “North” to the Third World.

The World Bank’s job is to reconcile “structuralist” views with the economic inefficiency and the important environmental liabilities of river-length embankments. The bank will also take into account the reticent skepticism of Japanese, British and European Community aid officials about embankments.

Some donor-country representatives attending the London meeting will try to restrain the Bangladeshi engineers’ response to floods. But the diplomats will not oppose embankments so strongly as to compromise their countries’ future participation in this decision-making or to complicate relations with Bangladesh.

It may be an uneasy meeting. The desire of industrialized countries to bring help to Bangladesh is being steered toward an inefficient mega-project, one that targets a dramatic, but secondary, problem. Despite their huge cost, embankments will be liabilities to Bangladesh’s people, not assets.

These qualms should not be suppressed. The purely engineering response to floods in Bangladesh will lead to unproductive, and therefore unrepayable, “investment.” Similar transactions contributed to the Third World debt crisis; they silently discredit the North-South aid relationship, which instead needs to be fortified by disciplined use of resources.

The London meeting should work for an end to the embankment pressures and support Bangladesh’s commitment to population-growth restraint, education and more productive year-round farming.