PERSPECTIVE ON FLOOD CONTROL : Exporting a Policy That’s All Wet : The U.S. is trying to foist on Bangladesh the same solution--levees--that failed America’s heartland.

The townspeople of Des Moines, Iowa, and the villagers of Bhuapur, Bangladesh, have more in common today than anyone might have imagined just one month ago. While the flood-soaked Midwesterners are suffering through their worst flood in memory, the people of Bhuapur are still dealing with the aftermath of their own flood of the century, which hit in the summer of 1988. That flood brought both sorrow and joy; 2,500 lost their lives, yet after the rivers returned to their channels, the peasants of Bangladesh harvested a record crop of rice and jute.

Ironically, the most difficult legacy of Bangladesh’s monster flood is a U.S.-supported plan to build $15 billion worth of flood-control levees--the same type of levees that failed to control the floods now sweeping across America’s heartland.

Despite billions of dollars spent damming and diking, straightening and dredging the rivers of the Mississippi Valley, not to mention the rest of the nation’s rivers, flood damages in the United States continue to soar. According to a recent federal task force report, annual flood losses have more than doubled, in real terms, since the Army Corps of Engineers began building the modern river-control system almost 60 years ago. This effort has cost more than dollars; we’ve lost much of our natural rivers, with their wild fisheries, riparian forests and wetlands, and their natural ability to store and convey floodwaters. Now, with the rivers squeezed between high earthen walls--built as much for the barge industry as for flood control--the flood waters rise higher than ever before and rush violently through the numerous weak links in the chain of levees.

The future, even the top officers of the Corps now humbly agree, is in flood management, rather than flood control: non-structural measures such as zoning and insurance, and flood-proofing vital infrastructure like water-treatment plants.

Yet, while President Clinton is asking for $2.5 billion in flood relief for the Midwest, the federal government, through the World Bank, is pushing on Bangladesh exactly the same structural flood-control schemes that are now being forsaken at home. The Bangladesh Flood Action Plan, which is being coordinated by the World Bank and funded by the United States and 11 other wealthy countries, proposes to wall off 2,500 miles of Bangladesh’s three powerful rivers, the Ganges, Brahmaputra and Meghna. But people in Bangladesh are organizing to stop the project before the bulldozers do too much damage.

In Bangladesh, flood management is not a newfangled concept. The country’s agricultural system depends on the nourishing flooding that every year inundates up to one-third of the country. Eighty percent of the protein consumed in Bangladesh comes from freshwater fish that spawn in the flood plain during monsoon season. The Bengali language has two words for flood: barsha, which are the beneficial annual floods, and bona, the infrequent and destructive events, as occurred in 1988.

The people of Bhuapur worry that the World Bank’s levees will stop the beneficial barsha floods, but, like the Corps’ levees along the Mississippi, will be powerless to stop the killer bona floods. And more immediately, up to 5 million Bangladeshis may be forced from their homes to make way for the great wall of levees.

What Bangladesh really needs, say the citizens’ organizations confronting the World Bank, is protection from the brutal cyclones that regularly sweep out of the Bay of Bengal. The most recent killed 150,000 coastal dwellers in April, 1991. Their solution is high-ground refuges, emergency response systems and reforestation of the coastal mangrove forests that used to blunt the cyclone-driven coastal floods.

Even a team of experts hired by the U.S. Agency for International Development after the 1988 flood agreed that levees wouldn’t solve Bangladesh’s flood problems. They recommended non-structural flood-management investments--assisting the farmers of Bangladesh in their traditional adaptations to living on one of the world’s most dynamic flood plains.

But for the World Bank, and the donor countries in charge of the Bangladesh Flood Action Plan, flood management is too cost-effective. Unlike thousands of miles of levees, it doesn’t require enough money for procurement of lucrative consulting and construction contracts by foreign firms--unfortunately the bottom line driving too much of the international aid business.

When the floodwaters finally recede, the people of Des Moines will undoubtedly be asking some tough questions about federal flood policy. Perhaps they should be asking about the government’s international flood policy as well.