COLUMN ONE : The Misery That Is Bangladesh : It is a land beset by fierce storms, crushing poverty, malnutrition and disease--and a government incapable of developing solutions.

Bearded and nearly toothless, Mohammed Nurullah has struggled all his life on the muddy killing fields of Bangladesh.

He and his family, landless sharecroppers, have moved seven times in 30 years as swollen rivers or the vast Bay of Bengal suddenly surged across the world’s largest delta, engulfing their tiny bamboo-and-thatch homes and killing their neighbors.

Now they must move again, victims not only of the April 29-30 cyclone that ravaged this sad land but also of the intense population pressure and grinding poverty that forces millions each year to move ever closer to the edge of disaster. Caught on constantly shifting, low-lying islands called “chars,” they battle nature and each other in the desperate search for arable land.

“This land is shrinking,” said Nurullah, 57, his thin frame parched from sun and lack of food. “Many lands are underwater. Our island is becoming smaller and smaller. Where shall we go?”

It is a question that plagues Bangladesh as it struggles to rebuild yet again from a biblical-scale catastrophe. The strongest cyclone in more than a century left about 139,000 dead, more than 1 million homes damaged or destroyed and $3 billion in damages, the government says.

And as international aid pours into the destitute land--including eight U.S. Navy warships carrying swarms of helicopters and landing craft and about 7,500 American troops--no one sees any quick answers.

“The solutions won’t come in my lifetime,” said Robin Needham, 35, acting director of CARE, the largest private relief and development agency in Bangladesh. “And present trends are not particularly encouraging. But if we don’t start, we won’t solve them in my son’s lifetime, either.”

But by then, the problems may be far worse. About 113 million people already are crammed into this Wisconsin-sized country. More than half are younger than 16. So even if population programs succeed and birthrates plummet--which no one is predicting--the population will double in 40 years.

That grim reality casts a long shadow on Bangladesh’s few real successes. Although food production increased dramatically in the 1980s, for example, thanks to Green Revolution seeds and techniques, it is barely keeping pace with population.

Even worse, growing inequities in land and resources--often because the Green Revolution favors large landholders over small farmers--has drastically increased the number of landless peasants. Indeed, studies show the average Bangladeshi actually consumes fewer calories and less protein today than 25 years ago, the only country in South Asia to show a decline.

“There should not be shortages of food here,” says an official from the U.S. Agency for International Development. “But the problem is people don’t have the resources to buy food.”

Partly as a result, despite a fast-expanding infant and child immunization program, about 870,000 children younger than five years die of malnutrition and disease each year, according to the U.N. Children’s Fund (UNICEF). That’s 6% of the world’s total. Up to half the infants are born malnourished, the highest rate in the world.

“We call it the silent emergency,” said Neill McKee, a UNICEF spokesman.

Six in 10 survivors are stunted in growth. Nearly 30,000 preschool children are blinded each year by vitamin A deficiency, one of the easiest, cheapest diseases to prevent. Although child labor is outlawed, one-fourth of the nation’s children work for a living, including 6-year-olds who earn pennies a day breaking bricks in Dhaka’s teeming slums.

“Because they are children, they are paid less, but they are expected to put in the same work as adults--10 hours a day,” said Rosemary Husin, a UNICEF program officer. “It is Dickensian, but they have no other options.”

The statistics are numbing. Only 22% of women and 46% of men are literate. Only 6% of homes have sanitary latrines. The average annual income is less than $170, the life expectancy only 49 years. Like all averages, these overstate the well-being of the least fortunate.

Geography only compounds the problems. Bangladesh is at the head of a natural funnel formed by the shallow Bay of Bengal, and tropical cyclones roar ashore with frightening regularity. Seven of the 10 deadliest storms of the 20th Century have hit Bangladesh.

The damage is especially high because Bangladesh lies on the exposed delta of three great rivers: the Brahmaputra, Ganges and Meghna. Together, they carry enough water each year to cover the entire low-lying country to a depth of 25 feet. Unfortunately, they often do.

Floods last week left more than 1 million people so marooned that even U.S. helicopters, filled with relief goods, could not find dry places to land. Catastrophic floods in 1988 inundated nearly a fourth of the country. Unabated deforestation upstream only increases the problems.

Even in normal times, the giant rivers and countless tributaries constantly change course, carving the soft earth into new beds and alluvial islands. Each year, entire towns are imperiled as rivers silt up or change course.

River erosion is eating the village of Megaiya, north of Dhaka, for example. Hundreds of huts have been washed away, and hope is fading for the town’s oldest building, a concrete school built in 1919, as well as a college, a hospital, a granary and scores of shops.

“The countdown to destruction has started,” said Hedayetullah Mahmud, a local administrator.

Similarly, the fertile flat islands or chars regularly appear, disappear, then reappear in the country’s ever-changing landscape. No map, it is said, is ever current in Bangladesh.

Nine miles out in the storm-tossed Bay of Bengal, for example, Hatiya Island has shifted steadily south over the last decade. A 10-foot earth embankment surrounded what the government considered habitable land. More than 7,000 people moved outside the embankment, however, onto newly formed chars.

They were the first hit by last month’s cyclone. “Everyone who was there was washed away,” said Ernest Roy, a local community development officer.

Most of the families had migrated south, as the island’s northern edge eroded. “These destitute people, these landless people, are unregistered,” Roy said. “Even the government doesn’t know they are there. You could say they are illegal settlers.”

It is one reason that the cyclone’s real death toll will never be known. Although legally owned by the government, the worst-hit chars often have no police, military, doctors or schools. Char battles are common, as peasants fight with clubs and knives for meager homesteads.

“Land disputes are quite common,” said Denis McClean, a Red Cross official. “If they leave their little homes, even in a cyclone, they could come back and find someone else squatting in it.”

Nationally, ambitious government plans to build flood-control systems, embankments and a network of raised concrete cyclone shelters have made little progress. Nor has a World Bank-funded program to plant 75,000 acres of forests on the southeast coast near Cox’s Bazar.

At least 13,750 acres of forests have been destroyed to facilitate shrimp farms, according to government figures. Valuable coastal mangrove forests also were illegally cleared by timber merchants and corrupt officials.

“The denudation of the coast has left us without basic protection,” said Abdullah Noman, minister of fisheries, livestock, forestry and environment.

The $2 billion a year in foreign aid has had mixed results. A massive irrigation project financed by the World Bank in the 1970s mostly aided rich farmers, studies show. Similarly, an elaborate French plan to construct huge dikes would be expensive to maintain--and would remove hundreds of thousands of acres of arable land from peasant cultivation.

Although Bangladesh is now democratic, a series of corrupt military governments hasn’t helped it. A Swedish study several years ago estimated that 15% to 40% of aid funds “disappear on their way through the system, appropriated partly by officials, partly by locally elected bodies.”

Nor is there a sense of urgency. After the floods of 1988, for example, the Japanese government donated 237 high-speed, flat-bottom rescue and hospital boats. Despite the current crisis, most still sit unused in a navy warehouse in Mongla.

Indeed, the government’s chief skill appears to be its ability to dramatize its plight. Although government warehouses hold 800,000 tons of rice and wheat, helicopters ferried far more foreign journalists than food in the days after last month’s cyclone, allowing the world to see ever more pathetic images of a nation under siege.

“Disasters are a great marketing device,” Jon Summers, an Asia Foundation official, said recently. “You don’t get $2 billion for nothing.”

The disaster relief will help the sick and starving. Long-term problems are far more complex. Government banks mostly help large landholders, for example. Their land serves as collateral, they know how to fill out forms, and, if necessary, to bribe local officials to get low-interest loans.

Many then turn around and lend to the landless, charging 120% interest a year. Sharecroppers who till the soil for half the crop must borrow to pay for the fertilizer, irrigation and seeds the Green Revolution requires. Payment will be impossible for many who lost their crops, plows and oxen.

The harsh statistics come to life--and to death--out on the muggy chars, where millions are trying to rebuild shattered homes, farms and lives. Here on Sandwip Island, thousands of landless families who moved onto the giant tidal flats on the island’s southern edge are now homeless. Thousands more are dead or missing.

Shortly after sunrise in Sharikat village, a long line forms outside a white army tent. Many of the children have grotesquely distended bellies from worms. Inside, Dr. Samso Huda has treated 300 people in three days, mostly for dysentery and diarrhea. He struggles to insert a needle to rehydrate a listless child, who lay with closed eyes and sallow skin on the cot.

“He has come at the 11th hour,” Dr. Huda says. “I cannot even find the vein.”

The cyclone’s 15-foot waves destroyed the village’s school and those who huddled inside.

“They cried and cried for help, but what could we do?” said Mohammed Sadik, the headmaster, who survived in a nearby concrete shelter built by the Red Cross.

The shelter is now the center for relief operations. Local officials go door-to-door distributing food delivered by helicopters. Some villagers complain that the officials demand payment for food, but if so, no one appears to be starving.

Few people used to live on Sandwip. Instead, farmers would come from the mainland to cultivate the fields, then flee during the twice-annual cyclone season. Now 350,000 or so live here, clinging to land that often seems mostly water.

“This land is not permanent,” says Kaji Mahabul Awal, 30, as he surveyed the crumbling shoreline. “The sea eats it. So people are suffering.”

Two 13-foot-high coastal embankments were washed away, leaving fields exposed to the next storm. Salt water still floods the fields as well as freshwater ponds used for fishing, washing and bathing. Cow’s carcasses and a bloated corpse sprawl in the hot sun.

Several hundred survivors, fishermen and their families, are crowded into a concrete building about a mile away. Their homes, nets and boats were washed away. Jammed side by side, they cook and sleep on the cold floor. Naked children wail and a gnarled old woman picks in the dirt for crumbs.

Still, there are miracles here. Radhika Bala, 26, was washed inland by the waves. How, she’s not sure. A day later, she gave birth to her fifth child. She named him Bonya, or Tidal Wave.

“When the baby came from my womb, I cried,” she says. “And no one came. But the baby came out and cried. Then the people came to help.”

As night falls, the paddies rustle softly in a salty breeze from the Bay of Bengal. Frogs croak in the ponds, as giant fruit bats glide overhead. A white egret is the only splash of color in the muddy expanse. All is peaceful.

And under a storm-shredded coconut palm, Ali Agbar, a 50-year-old day laborer, quietly rebuilds his home where four of his children so recently died.

“We are all unsafe here,” he says. “But where can we go?”