The makeshift Rohingya camps have now become tent cities dotting the hills and farmlands.
They include latest and dynamic economies, fueled by donor money and driven by a captive marketplace for lots of of 1000’s of individuals in need of food, shelter, work and, for individuals who can afford them, consumer goods.
For generations, trade has undermined ethnic and non secular rivalries amongst Rakhine, Rohingya and Bangladeshis who flit between the 2 countries.
Trade was barely interrupted when dozens of Rohingya villages were torched last August, prompting the exodus of some 700,000 people by land and sea to Bangladesh.
The sky was heavy with smoke, but Min Min said he continued to deliver “made in Burma” cargo to the port of Teknaf – rice, ginger, cosmetics, noodles and “ainshi” chestnuts, ubiquitous at Rohingya snack stands.
The influx of refugees has been good for business, said his friend Thoin Line, an ethnic importer from Arakan on the Bangladeshi side of the border.
“The Rohingya are tough… they work day and night,” he says, adding, “and their wages are usually not very high.”
Below, a line of bedraggled, wiry staff emerge from the hull of the boat, each carrying on their shoulders two 30-kilogram bags of ginger imported from Burma.
For their backbreaking efforts, they may earn between 300 and 500 taka ($3-6) a day – an honest wage for staff who’re officially banned from working in Bangladesh and are thus forced to pay a part of their wages to camp leaders who select the labor force.
Most refugees are either unemployed or stuck at the underside of the job ladder – where they’ve been since Myanmar began expelling its Rohingya in 1978.
At the Kutupalong megacamp in Bangladesh, 24-year-old entrepreneur Kamal Hussein prays for rain.
His income comes from almost 50 cell phone charging points secured with bamboo struts.
“Business is slow… it’s sunny and most people have solar panels, so they don’t need our store,” he said.
Business is healthier when it rains, because then “photovoltaic panels don’t work”,
Consumer goods corresponding to mobile phones are in high demand as refugees settle within the country, spending salaries and remittances from relatives abroad.
Salesman Kaiser Ahmed said he was selling 5 or 6 phones every week at existing camps before the August crisis.
“Now there are about 300 of them,” he added.
Like many other Bangladeshis, Kaiser’s income rose with the crisis.
Over the past 12 months, shops selling and pawning Rohingya jewelry, stalls selling brightly coloured saris and stores charging refugees 30 US cents to look at English Premier League matches survive TVs have sprouted up on the outskirts of the camp.
Moreover, nonprofits operating within the camps are large buyers of local bamboo, tarpaulins, concrete, pots, pans and blankets and employ 1000’s of Bangladeshi and Rohingya staff.
Bangladeshi Mohammad Jashan, 26, whose house is on the outskirts of Kutupalong, says he has climbed the worth chain in each of the three positions he has held in foreign organizations prior to now 12 months.
He currently earns $300 a month for a British charity – several times greater than the national average.
“My next salary will be higher because I have more skills,” he said.
But there are critical points.
Poorer people in Bangladesh say the influx of Rohingyas has caused wages to fall.
Crime, drugs and prostitution are on the rise, and the influx of foreign NGOs is distorting prices – enriching owners of apartments, cars, hotels and restaurants, but deepening the poverty of local residents who don’t have anything to supply them.
In June, the World Bank moved to ease conflicts between the Rohingya and their Bangladeshi hosts by offering nearly half a billion dollars in subsidies for health care, education and sanitation for refugees.
The aim is to assist ease Dhaka’s burden and create services that may also be used – and worked by – by Bangladeshis.
This article appeared within the print edition of the South China Morning Post as: The influx of refugees is fueling a business boom in makeshift camps
