To put this in perspective, Bangladesh has a population of 150 million, according to their bureau of statistics in 2005-06 only 350,000 people were employed in manufacturing, 149,000 of them women, so obviously nothing "we" do will make any difference to the lives of Bangladeshis overall. If we cut consumption of sweatshop products there will be no effect other than to put a small number of workers out of a job.

Lexi,

The "Green Revolution" is not sustainable.

Tell me what happens when there's no longer enough ground water?...already happening.

http://www.nasa.gov/topics/earth/features/india_water.html

Tell me what happens when the soil is degraded and poisoned by overuse of pesticides and fertiliser?

Tell me what happens when Western corporations try and patent strains of rice that have been used and shared amongst the native population for thousands of years.?

Tell me what happens when Seed companies develop new rice strains and push them onto peasant farmers, whereby the second generation of seeds are sterile and can't be saved and shared?

Tell me how can these peasant farmers afford to pay through the nose for new seeds each season?

Tell me what happens when farming is converted to monoculture and peasants go into debt for buy all the paraphernalia (fertiliser, pesticides and seed) needed to farm this way?

Tell me how it is that over 200,000 peasant farmers have committed suicide in India because of debt racked up this way to Western corporations. Their favoured method is to drink the pesticides which have poisoned their soil and groundwater.

Tell me what happens when much ancient knowledge of local bio-diversity is loss to a monoculture system and to the peasants themselves?

Although, I agree that much of this was "not anticipated".

Jay the nmbers I'm finding for Bangladesh's germent idustry is more like 3.6 million directly employed in the garment industry.
http://asiafoundation.org/media/view/slideshow/66/bangladeshs-garment-workers as one source, wikipedia puts the number higher at close to 4 million. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bangladesh_textile_industry

The proportion of female workers in the industry seems to be listed at between 85% and 90% in most sources.

Another group which have been mentioned in the thread are the rural/urban migrant workers in China. Figures I'm seeing for them suggest about 130 million (or more) out of a population of around 1.35 billion. Not a trivial sized group.

R0bert

<< The "Green Revolution" is not sustainable>>
To adapt Bill Clinton’s quip : “It's population levels, stupid"

Soil degradation [Western corporations fault!]
Sweatshops in Bangladesh [Western consumers fault!]
Children dying of preventable diseases in Africa [ Western medicines fault!]

Poirot’s warped mindset [the Western Australian Education systems fault!]

At 1968 population levels the Green revolution was sustainable
At 2013 population levels, it's questionable.

Egypt –with a population of 1-2 million --used to be the breadbasket of the Roman Empire
Today –with a population of 83.7 million -- it is near enough to a basket case.

Dead right SPQR, Egypt grew its population from 40 to 80 million on the
subsidised food made possible by oil exports.
When peak Egyptian oil occurred in 2000 and then on the downslope they
reached the point where they started importing oil and the funds for
subsidies dried up they started to riot and finally changed their government.

Now as a result they have both fuel and food shortages.

Does that ring a warning bell for the rest of us ?

>>Tell me what happens when Western corporations try and patent strains of rice that have been used and shared amongst the native population for thousands of years.?<<

Hard-working mad evil (sorry, Western) scientists get the intellectual property that is due to them for all the hard spent hours in the lab.

I'd love it if we had a societal system where scientists worked pro bono for the good of mankind but that isn't how it works. They're stuck in the same rat-race as everyone else and they need to earn a living. I think they do more to earn it than most. Since the Enlightenment quantity of life has gone up in spades. It seems to be a matter of opinion as to whether quality of life has increased but I'll tell you one thing: I'm really glad I'm old enough to be weighing up thorny issues like this instead of dying as an infant - which would have been very likely without the efforts of scientists. If the patent system is the only mechanism by which innovators have the chance to gain fair recompense for improving all our lives is it really a bad thing? Can you think of a better system which still fits within the capitalist paradigm and provides fair recompense to innovators whilst improving the fortunes of all mankind? I can't but I'm not a very creative thinker. Maybe you can.

>>Tell me what happens when Seed companies develop new rice strains and push them onto peasant farmers, whereby the second generation of seeds are sterile and can't be saved and shared?<<

Piracy, theft, and brilliant biological innovations. And a step up in attempts to control the flow of biological innovations by the seed companies, followed by better piracy, theft etc... an agricultural arms race betwixt the agricultural corporations and the farmers, producing better results for all mankind.

TBC