Dhaka, the capital of Bangladesh, the economic stoppage due to covid 19 has delivered the Buriganga River to the Water Hyacinths.

The plant, native to the Amazon, has been proliferating for decades in the region, to the point of suffocating rivers that are already terribly polluted.

Failing to succeed in eliminating this scourge, Bangladesh is trying to exploit it. A factory in Dhaka, Bangladesh, produces chipboard made from these fibres. In the Bay of Bengal, farmers cultivate floating plots of land on a bed of water hyacinths.

For the umpteenth time this season, a thick green carpet of water hyacinths moving with the wind and currents covers the entire Bay of Kisumu in western Kenya.

It arrived in the early 1990s in Lake Victoria, via the Kagera River to the west in unclear circumstances, and has since seriously complicated the movement of many fishing boats and other craft on this lake shared by Tanzania, Uganda and Kenya.

Kenya is interested in Bangalorean industrial processes to eradicate the plague of water hyacinth.