Hafiza Khatun remembers one morning two years ago. Her husband had come running back from work in a state of distress. The embankment wall that kept the ocean at bay from their homes and fields in Cox’s Bazaar district in Bangladesh had breached again and seawater was flooding in. Crops could no longer be grown and homes and belongings had all been claimed by the marauding tides, as the sea kept rising due to climate change.
Hafiza’s husband, a manager in a betel leaf farm, was out of a job. After days of struggle when they had to sell most of their cattle to survive, her husband decided to leave for Malaysia for work with 20 other men from nearby villages who were to be smuggled by boat via Myanmar.
Left with three young children, Hafeza worked as a domestic servant in the one of the richer homes in the morning, and as a labourer in a betel leaf farm in the afternoon. While the older boy helped her, the younger two stayed in the house, unable to attend school. There was never enough food for the four of them. Illness set in, sometimes mild, and sometimes serious enough to keep Hafiza from work and denying them the daily income they so desperately needed.
A report released last month warns of the devastating and increasing impact of climate change on migration in South Asia. Climate Change Knows no Borders, prepared by ActionAid, Climate Action Network South Asia and Bread for the World (Brot Fuer Die Welt), calls on national policymakers to especially monitor impacts of climate-induced migration on women and urgently address the policy gap.
Unsafe Migration
The rights of migrants and their families are being threatened by unsafe migration, which is often driven by desperation and a lack of options caused by climate disasters. The impacts of migration on women, both those migrating and those left behind, is also not yet adequately understood or addressed by national or international policies.Harjeet Singh, ActionAid’s Global Lead on Climate Change
“Environmental migration is a gendered process, but discussions within public, policy, and academia regarding environmental migration are often gender-neutral, few studies making the link between migration, environment and gender,” said International Organisation for Migration (IOM) in 2014, flagging the gap when the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in its Fifth Assessment Report said, “Climate change is projected to increase the displacement of people throughout this century.”
The 2016 Global Report on Trafficking in Persons by UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) released in December says women and girls make up 71 percent of human trafficking victims. Including for the first time a thematic chapter on connections between trafficking, migration and conflict, it underscores that trafficking in persons and migration flows resemble each other, increasing vulnerability of forced migration victims.
After repeated extreme or slow onset weather events have reduced a rural family to extreme poverty, the migration of younger women, usually daughters (even minors) increasingly appear as the best option for the entire family, finds an IOM study.
Pull Factor
This is because the demand for labour in highly gendered but low-skilled niche jobs, such as domestic work, child and elderly care, is rising, as more and more educated women in South Asian cities are taking up careers outside home. Bangladeshi migrant women are seen increasingly in such jobs in Kolkata, Delhi and Mumbai. Together with garment and entertainment industries in India, this demand is acting as a powerful pull factor.
Even so, available figures show male migration is more common in the region. Millions of women like Hafiza Khatun, left behind at home, are facing an overwhelming burden.
Increasingly, research is documenting that the workload on women left behind is multiplied manifold because the nature of migrant work being uncertain, remittance from migrant males is often sporadic. Agriculture remains critical for the family remaining at home to survive, finds an International Water Management Institute (IWMI) study.
Overburdened Women
Not only must the women do household work and child and elderly care, but also generate income by taking on their husbands’ role in agriculture. This too without access to capital or credit, while negotiating existing agricultural services dominated by men, where the women have to overcome several cultural barriers.
Women are thus reporting exhaustion, poverty and illness, and fields are being left uncultivated as they struggle to cope alone. In many areas these single women, called drought widows or flood widows by their communities, report increased incidences of assault and violence. When disasters happen, such as the 2015 earthquake in Nepal, the lack of men in the village can put communities in further danger, the ActionAid report says.
The struggles of women environmental migrants have been documented but there is no statistical data to formulate effective policies. The crux of the problem is that while disaster-driven forced migration is likely to increase further, there is no systematic data and statistical record of internal and cross-border migration on which governments can base their policies.
A 2016 IWMI infograph says as many as 3.23 million migrants from Bangladesh are in India. India’s Minister for State for Home informed Parliament in November that 20 million illegal Bangladeshi immigrants, equivalent to Australia’s population, were in India. This is a volatile political issue; in 2004, Parliament was told the 2001 figure was 12 million. A recent report from The Economist quotes a former head of India’s Research and Analysis Wing (RAW) saying 15 million Bangladeshis are living in India. A 2016 IOM study, titled ‘Migrant Smuggling Data and Research: A global review of the emerging evidence base’, says 25,000 Bangladeshis are thought to enter India each year.
(This piece originally appeared in India Climate Dialogue. It has been edited for length, read the full piece here.)
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