Crowded house: Bangladesh's agonizing human problems are caused, in part, by its incredible population density.

The most densely populated nation on Earth is not Japan or China, it's Bangladesh, a country the size of Wisconsin but with half the population of the U.S. As the world's population increases geometrically, from 1.3 billion 80 years ago to 5.6 billion now and a projected 13 billion by 2040, Bangladesh makes for a sobering case study.

In the Bangladeshi village of Dhangmari, men check their nets in the Pusur River. Dhangmari is a small coastal fishing community at the edge of the greatest remaining stand of mangrove forests in the world, the Sundarbans. The men gather in bucketfuls of finger-sized fish. They will keep every one. The women cook in their bamboo shelters and the children splash in the river. The fertile, wet land is only a few feet above sea level and there is not a hill to be seen.

Some men use poles to push a large boat upstream. They have loaded it with sundari trees. According to a local guide, this wood was cut illegally, but there is no one to enforce the ban. The guide adds that this is not new: They have been cutting the Sundarbans for 75 years and the remaining Bengal tigers are being pushed out to the sea.

Dhangmari appears to be like many indigenous coastal fishing villages in other countries, but there is a strange consistency in the residents' personal histories. No one has lived here for more than four years. How can this be? These are indigenous peoples, living for the most part off the land and outside the cash economy. How can they be such recent arrivals when all around are recently built dikes, man-made fish ponds and cleared land?

People cheer any visitors from the United States, offer their hands and say, "Thank you for the shelter." U.S. Aid for International Development (USAID) has just finished with the construction of a typhoon shelter in nearby Mongla. The next time a typhoon comes, they will be notified and they will have time to flee to it. Not like last time.

On April 30, 1991, a typhoon crashed into Bangladesh, killing 125,000 people in one day, and leaving many millions more homeless. The village of Dhangmari was hard hit. Twenty-foot seas and 90-mile-an-hour winds killed nearly everyone. Those people were living on tidal coast lands where previously no one had ever lived. And now, a whole new group of people has recolonized the marshlands, just like the new coconut trees that sprout up where old ones were blown over. They know that the typhoons will come. They know how dangerous it is. So why are they here? Because there is no room for them anyplace else.

A Hindu activist, who cannot give his name for fear of reprisals, charges that the Islamic government of Bangladesh is encouraging and even leading in the seizure of Hindu lands. He documents case after case, of many tens of thousands of acres of farmland being seized from Hindus, and of Hindus forced to sell at extremely cheap prices under physical threat from the local Islamic governments.

Later, joined by a Hindu attorney, the activist talks of the "Enemy Property Laws in Bangladesh" Statute. The attorney produces a government book on property confiscation and says that it is illegal for anyone to possess it, at risk of getting arrested. Penalties for being found with it, he says, are worse than those for reading the works of exiled Bangladeshi author Taslima Nasrin, who fled her country after political parties put a "hit" contract on her. She is currently being tried in absentia for blasphemy.

There is much evidence of a systematic, state-organized program of ethnic cleansing occurring in Bangladesh. Many Hindu residents say they have had their lands seized, that they can't get employment, attend school or teach because they are Hindu. Numerous Hindu temples have been destroyed and their lands seized by the government. Hindu activists charge that this is a deliberate attempt to make conditions so unbearable for those remaining Hindus that they will feel forced to flee into India. Many millions have already left.

Bangladesh has more than 125 million people, 3,000 per square mile and is growing at 2.2 percent per year. Rural female illiteracy approaches 90 percent, which offers one explanation for the failure of family planning programs. Average daily caloric intake is 1,800 per capita (half that of the U.S.) and declining. Bangladesh is on every aid organization's list of international basketcases. The World Bank rates these people as among the poorest economically in the world

Upriver from Dhangmari is Dhaka, the capital of Bangladesh. At the Secretariat, representatives of the Health, Education, Environmental and Family-Planning ministries talk about their programs to reduce female illiteracy and begin family planning programs. In the cities, they say, there have been some successes. But it is the rural areas, where most of the people live, that there is much resistance from the "Mullahists," conservative Muslims who, like Islamic Catholics, believe that only God can determine the size of a family.

Can Bangladesh make it? Is there time? Demographic experts project Bangladesh to grow to at least 200 million people before there is a leveling off. Bangladesh is already dependent upon continuous foreign aid to maintain minimum nutritional needs. The land is currently being worked to its near-maximum yields, but these yields may not be sustainable. In some places the land is producing three rice crops per year, but that bounty is very dependent upon imported irrigation pumps, fuel and agri-chemicals, and can hardly sustain another 75 million people.

In the 1990s, western aid organizations are barely keeping up with global emergency assistance needs. A crisis in teeming Bangladesh could strain available resources past the breaking point. And if that happens, all those people living so close to starvation will be pushed over the line.

CONTACT: United Nations Population Fund, 220 East 42nd Street, New York, NY 10017/[phone].