Hugh Brammer

Ch 1. Downing College

Ch 2. Gold Coast/Ghana

Ch 3. East Pakistan

Ch 4. Zambia

Ch 5. Bangladesh

Ch 6. Retirement

Ch 7. Afterthoughts

 

Ch 6. Enjoying an active retirement 1987−present

 

Back to Bangladesh

At 62 (retirement age in FAO), I did not feel ready to retire; (I still don’t at 92!). I settled in Hove, about as near to the Equator in Britain as I could get (having remembered how cold Cambridge was in winter in the 1940s) and spent a year as a Visiting Fellow at the Institute for Development Studies at the University of Sussex. The objective was to write up my material on Bangladesh in a development context. In the event, I didn’t get much written. Serious floods in Bangladesh in 1987 and 1988 stimulated international donors to seek what could be done to prevent such recurrent disasters. So, in 1988, I found myself invited back to Bangladesh: first on a UNDP-funded Agriculture Sector Study, and then the UNDP-funded Flood Policy Study which led to the World Bank-led Flood Action Plan (FAP) on which I was a visiting consultant from 1989 until 1995. Between times, I spent a month in Hanoi on a UNDP-funded preparatory disaster management study, two weeks on a FAO project identification mission on the Irrawaddy floodplain in Burma (now Myanmar) and a month in St Lucia in the Caribbean on a World Bank-funded rehabilitation study after hurricane Debby in 1994.

 

On a field trip in Bangladesh during the FAP period, I recall encountering persons living alongside the west bank of the Brahmaputra-Jamuna river where the embankment was threatened by riverbank erosion. They pleaded with me for groynes to be built to prevent the river devouring their land, which their families had probably owned for generations and on which they depended for a living (and their social status). I recall feeling humbled, as a professional, by the experience of not being able to offer them hope of a technical solution to this awful problem. In Bangladesh’s quasi-feudal society, people expect their patrons – in this case the government – to protect them, regardless (even oblivious) of the practicality and cost (in the same way as, during negotiation of the Flood Policy Study, government representatives had asserted that flood protection for Bangladesh was not a matter of economics: it was a human right, which donors must support).

 

… and to Zambia

I also spent a month back in Zambia. The Director-General of FAO had raised an interesting question. He had observed that the FAO agroecological zones map of Africa showed large areas of land in Zambia well-suited for agriculture, and had asked why much of it was unused. Someone had noticed that there was a lime quarry north of the capital Lusaka and had suggested that lime might be a remedy for the acid soils.

 

Soil acidity, I found, was not the limitation. It was socio-economic conditions that were impeding agricultural development in large, sparely-populated parts of the country; (this was in the days before environmental considerations entered into land evaluations). In traditional farming, women were the cultivators; the role of men was mainly to cut and burn the trees that had grown in the 10−20 fallow years between cultivation periods. But most of the able men who could cut trees had gone off to find employment on the Zambian Copper Belt or in South African mines, so the traditional system of soil fertility renewal had broken down, and crop yields and farm incomes were low. Moreover, fertilisers – which might have to travel 1,000 miles by rail and road from ports in South Africa or Mozambique − were much too expensive to use on subsistence or locally-marketed crops in interior parts of the country. With low population densities, too, and poor rural roads, it was uneconomic for farmers to produce crops for urban markets beyond a radius of a few miles; poor water supplies for drinking, livestock or irrigation use were also limitations in some areas. Physical soil capability was not the only criterion that influenced development potential, therefore; the limitation in this case was economics. I don’t think that my puncturing of a panacea technical solution was welcomed in HQ!

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Book writing

At the end of the Bangladesh Flood Action Plan in 1995, I at last got down to writing up my experience in that country. The first book, published in 1996, put on the record our soil findings and was addressed particularly to students and visiting consultants. I went on to write five more books on various aspects of agricultural development and disaster management in Bangladesh, then in 2004 what I thought would be the seventh and final one which pulled together the information on floods and flood management that I had gained while working on the Flood Action Plan. I had the books published in Bangladesh because that is where I wanted the information to be used.

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Throughout my retirement, I continued to write journal articles on soils and agricultural development (listed in a separate section). Inter alia, I wrote articles for the Tropical Agriculture Association of which I was a member, and for several years contributed cartoons drawn by a former FAO colleague, the late Tony Smyth: see Figure 6.1.

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Figure 6.1 Cartoon in Tropical Agriculture Association Newsletter, December 2001