Bangladesh has blocked Facebook and some mobile messaging apps for an undeclared amount of time. According to authorities, this is due to a home security risk. Some people, however, have bypassed the restriction, raising uncertainties regarding the effectiveness of such activity.
Bangladesh Major Social Media and Messaging Apps
Bangladeshi authorities have blocked Facebook, Carrier, Viber, WhatsApp, Line and also Tango after the nation’s highest court upheld death penalties on November 18 against two top opposition leaders for crimes committed during the Bangladesh 1971 war of independence. Comparable rulings have actually caused fatal protests in the past. Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina hinted at this move a week ago, citing home security reasons.
Confirming the ban, Sarowar Alam, an official of the nation’s Net regulatory authority BTRC claimed that the government has made a decision to suspend the operation of 6 social networking platforms. To their dismay, some people have bypassed this ban.
No Internet Connection for More than an Hour, Country-Wide
There was no internet connection in Bangladesh for more than an hour on Wednesday when the restriction was enforced. The government claims that it meant to only block certain services, but that something backfired. In any case, a good number of internet users in the country still managed to get on Facebook – once the internet was brought back – and made posts notifying people on ways to bypass the government’s restriction on the social networks.
Bangladesh Celebrities Tell People How to Fight Back
A. R. Rahman, one of one of the most prominent Facebook customers in Bangladesh with more than 250,000 fans, created on the network that he had neglected the ban by using a Proxy web server that showed his online place somewhere in Papua New Guinea, while he was actually in Dhaka.
It goes without saying that no one should suffer nonconsensual malnutrition, or–more bleakly–starve to death. But despite world governments’ working to reduce world hunger through the U.N. with the support of global philanthropic charities, there are many still suffering from food shortage, and global climate change is only exacerbating the effects of this worldwide tragedy.
SOME FAVORED LOCALES OF WORLD HUNGER
This May alone, 23 of Tanzania’s 25 regions had enough food to viably survive the summer, said Deputy Minister for Agriculture, Food Security and CooperativesGodfrey Zambi. He goes on to make the case to local media; “[i]t is only a small part of the country which faces shortage of food and the food we have is enough for all of them.”
Zambi continues, saying that until May 7th of 2015, the National Food Reserve Agency had 463,180.42 tons of maize, 5,710.27 tons of sorghum and 4,342.7 tons of rice reserved across the country.
A LITTLE LATE FOR WARNING
But Zambi made this announcement and implicit plea for help long before this year’s harvest season began. The present climate and food production levels of the nation make it obvious that many people are going to suffer from food shortage. The merciless weather has caused unusually long periods of droughts and equally long rainfall and floods that have forced the nation into a period of chronically reduced crop production.
These impoverished conditions are not limited to Zambia. Tanzania was projected to begin its own period of dangerous food shortage this June, and, globally, a report by FAO hypothesized that world hunger is presently affecting 805 million people, despite existent international efforts to reduce this great plight to humanity.
FORMERLY IMPOVERISHED NATIONS’ RECOVERIES ARE SOON TO BE TRAVESTIES
According to the Global Hunger Index 2014, 26 developing countries reduced their score by 50%. This means that Angola, Bangladesh, Cambodia, Chad, Ghana, Malawi, Niger, Rwanda, Thailand and Vietnam have all made incredibly significant progress reducing their respective populations’ food needs.
However, the threat of future food shortage is growing stronger and closer in time than we as a global community previously thought because of the accelerating progress of global climate change.
GLOBAL CLIMATE CHANGE EXACERBATES EXTREME WEATHER
In a recent report made by Grantham Mayo van Otterloo (GMO), humanity is coming precariously close to suffering a total breakdown of food systems linked to warming, drought, flooding and precipitation, which, if you haven’t kept track of extreme weather phenomena over the past twenty-five years (or even the past decade), are becoming more of a variable every single year.
The GMO report cites the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), and goes on to say that global climate change doesn’t just cause short-term food shortages, but actually alters the way food is produced worldwide, pushing food prices even higher, which only exacerbates the social antagonism of world hunger.
The Global Sustainability Institute (GSI) of Angilia Ruskin University published a report in June predicting that by the year 2040 the price of food will be four times higher than they were in 2000. The GMO report noted that this is twice today’s price to eat.
“The results show that based on plausible climate trends, and a total failure to change course, the global food supply system would face catastrophic losses, and an unprecedented epidemic of food riots,” warned Aled Jones, the institute’s director, in an article recently published by Business Insider. “In this scenario, global society essentially collapses as food production falls permanently short of consumption,” Jones laments.
IT’S TIME TO WAKE UP
In case you’re wondering if this is simply leftist fear-mongering, or the result of uncritical, picayune reporting; food production is reduced by rising temperatures because global climate change forces farmers to change their most fundamental farming methods. This is because they are always planning for subsequent seasons, and not simply holding on to past traditions for kinship’s sake, or whatever. In fact, according to the IPCC’s Fifth Assessment Report from 2014, every single decade of general warming that occurs decreases the total quantity of food the world is able to produce by 2%, which is roughly 4.86 million tons.
This is just the tip of the poverty-laden apocalyptic iceberg we’re facing as a global community. For more projected statistics of how global climate change will threaten our ability to eat, please consider the IPCC’s report linked here.
LET FORTIFIED BICYCLE GIVE YOUR ECO-FRIENDLY BIKE AN UPGRADE
Earlier today, local fishermen on the Andaman Sea rescued a wooden fishing vessel carrying 794 migrants from Myanmar and Bangladesh, and brought them to Indonesia. Directly after that, yet another fishing boat carrying a reported 400 desperate migrants was put on the radar after Thai authorities turned it away from the country’s shores. Up to this date, an estimated 6,000 to 20,000 migrants have been left to drift in boats on the sea, amidst a worsening global humanitarian crisis.
Myanmar migrants fleeing from religious persecution
The majority of the boat’s passengers identify as Rohingya Muslims from Myanmar. Most of the Rohingyan population resides in northern Rakhine townships, composing over 85 percent of the region’s demographic. Perhaps most notably, the Rohingyas have been internationally recognized as one of the most persecuted minorities in the world. In the past, many of the persecuted religious members have fled to refugee camps and ghettos in Bangladesh, as well as to sites along the Burmese-Thai border, where many of them remain displaced today in camps.
The vessel in question is said to have initially set its sights on debarking in Malaysia, and is just one unit in a larger flotilla that is largely under the control of traffickers. Since the beginning of March, the boats have wandering from point to point, hoping for neighboring countries to take in their fleeing refugees.
In addition to religious persecution, the passengers all suffer from economic hardship and, to a greater extent, general ethnic discrimination. The Myanmar migrants, who, up until a probable few weeks ago had been fed constant supplies of food and water by the traffickers, have been left to their own devices with a scarce food supply.
Hardships amidst stringent human trafficking crackdown
During this past week alone, up to 1,500 Myanmar migrants have landed ashore Malaysia and Indonesia. Most of them have been left in traumatized states, uncared and unguaranteed for. The captain and crewmembers of the red-and-green vessel reportedly abandoned the boat last week. A portion of the passengers reportedly refused to get off on Thailand’s shores because the country is in the process of a heavy crackdown on traffickers, but a Thai journalist documents that a significant other portion onboard were visibly distraught that they were not disembarking.
In the wake of this crisis, attention must be turned onto both Malaysia and Myanmar — the first, a predominantly Muslim country that has had the reputation of admitting thousands of Rohingya migrants in the past, and the latter, a state that has a history of institutional discrimination against its own Rohingya Muslim population, denying them democratic rights to citizenship.
