Dissent

abstract:

In the early 1980s, the World Bank approached Bangladesh with an offer. The bank would loan the government millions of dollars to turn rice fields along the country's coast into saltwater ponds for raising shrimp to export. typical of the structural adjustment programs pushed by the bank at the time, the "Shrimp Culture Project" made a few landowners fabulously rich, while robbing small farmers of their land and leaving farmworkers with little means of subsistence. Dispossession was both overt and insidious. Where land wasn't stolen through force or deceit, shrimp ponds blocked irrigation canals, destroying the food and water sources that had sustained rural life for centuries. Small farmers were forced to sell their plots and seek work in Dickensian cities