In Bangladesh, outsourcing and its resulting pollution handcuff society’s potential to reverse direction on a track that is leading them nowhere fast.
India’s neighbor is rich with cheap labor and acrid odors, but you would be hard-pressed to find a glass of clean drinking water there. In a country where the GDP-per capita is, to be generous, less than stellar, how can so much pollution overwhelm the nation’s air and water supply? Surely there are not hundreds of thousands of first-world vehicles depositing flatulence on the roads of Bangladesh. Maybe the western market monsters like Wal-Mart and J.C. Penney have some insight to Bangladesh’s pollution problem, considering their bountiful numbers of manufacturing and textile factories in the nation.
From a business standpoint, this outsourcing makes complete sense. Labor is so cheap in Bangladesh that you would probably call it working for free here in the United States. Also, regulation of pollution seems to be nonexistent, meaning no expensive and time-consuming safety precautions or cleanup procedures. Instead, workers slave away in deadly conditions for pennies a day and the toxic waste products of their efforts drain into the streams and rivers where they will eventually flow into village drinking wells.
On the opposite hand the economically savvy practices of western companies is the reality of Bangladesh — a country which would otherwise be aesthetically brilliant where the people are born into awful conditions and given no route to escape poverty and a life sentence working in a sweat shop.
Albeit highly unlikely, the best solution to the problem of outsourcing would be to eliminate the practice altogether. However, there are factors at play (particularly the depth of the pockets of lobbyists on Capitol Hill) that present nearly unmovable obstacles in the efforts of improving conditions in Bangladesh and other countries like it. Manufacturing companies’ weight in gold can be measured in the toxic sludge oozing through the riverbeds of third-world countries like Bangladesh, so any legislation pertaining to the regulation of their practices will likely be sponsored by a hedge-fund and overflowing with loop-hole riddled jargon aimed more at making peasants like me shut up than contributing to the humane issues at hand.
Despite what will likely be a long if not infinite road to improvement for Bangladesh and third world countries, their SOS calls have been heard and the status quo must be moved.
Travis Offield is a chemical engineering major from Horn Lake. Follow him on Twitter @travisoffield.
