Oh come on... Enough with the fashionable western self hate already.

It's just a statement of fact with a lot more reality behind it than your silly Calvinist notion that the Bangladeshi could construct a comprehensive levee system to keep the sea out if only they were as disciplined as the good old Dutch.

The coast of the Netherlands is as long as the coast of Bangladesh.

The coastline of the Netherlands is 451 kilometres, the coastline of Bangladesh is 710 kilometres. The Rhine/Meuse delta makes up about a third of the Dutch coastline, whereas the Ganges/Brahmaputra delta makes up most of the Bangladeshi coastline, and stretches into the neigbouring state of West Bengal in India. The peak discharge of the Rhine and Meuse combined is 16,000 cumecs, the combined peak discharge of the Ganges and Brahmaputra is 106,000 cumecs (the Missisippi has 56,000). Those are averages. The Netherlands had a per capita income of $6000 in 1950, when it was just rebounding from WWII, going up to $26000 in 1997, when the Delta Works were completed (estimates using y 2000 dollars). Bangladesh has a per capita income right now of somewhere around $450 using the same measure.