Salty land and worried farmers in southwestern Bangladesh
By Joanna Kakissis | October 02, 2009 | Bangladesh
Joanna Kakissis
A failing rice paddy field in southwestern Bangladesh.
I’ve read plenty of reports on how rising sea levels in the Bay of Bengal are slowly killing the fertile plains of southwestern Bangladesh. But at first glance, the land here looks anything but troubled. It’s a lush, green expanse of rice paddies and coconut trees canopied by a mercurial sky that, with little notice, alternatey pours sun or rain on the water-carved landscape. Everywhere, you can make out the moving figures of women in electric-colored saris and men in lungis cultivating the land.
But while Bangladeshi journalist Sumon Kaiser and I interviewed farmers in the region last weekend, a far different picture emerged. Everybody we talked to was worried. Farmers told us they were abandoning their rice crops, which were dying because the salty soil was so robbed of nutrients. Some farmers were abandoning their crops to work as laborers in nearby towns or as far away as interior India. The water in some areas is so brackish and unhealthy that some of the region’s environmentally dubious but very profitable shrimp farms are suffering from disease, according to a couple of local officials. One longtime farmer and village leader who had lost most of his rice paddies to salination and obsessively follows any news related to climate change says he often has nightmares that the rising Bay of Bengal will drown him and his family while he sleeps.
Later, over salty tea back at the hotel in the port city of Mongla, Sumon reminded me that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change says Bangladesh could lose 20 percent of its cultivated land to sea level rise, the largest amount in the world. “And it’s clearly already starting to affect people here,” he said.
Most of Bangladesh is less than 12 meters (39 feet) above sea level rise; scientists predict that if sea level were to rise just one meter (three feet), half of Bangladesh would be flooded. That could have disastrous consequences for a country that’s relatively small in land size (it’s about the size of Iowa) but incredibly packed with people; Bangladesh has more than 150 million residents, making it the seventh-most populous country in the world.
To be fair, sea-level rise due to global warming is not the only reason that this fertile region’s soil is dying. For instance, the shrimp farms that have been replacing the rice paddies have also added added salinity to the soil, since shrimp thrive on saline water. Bangladeshis have made very progressive efforts to combat sea level rise, by doing things such as adding silt to prevent river erosion and developing a salt-resistant strain of rice. And rural Bangladeshis have been migrating to city centers for years, seeking to make more money, so it’s difficult to parse just how many people are moving because they are “climate migrants.”
But the people we talked to in the southwest were so familiar with climate change and so worried about its effect on their land, that it made me wonder just how many farmers will be left here in a couple of decades. As I watched a wiry, kind-eyed man named Ashok wade through his ruined paddy field and look anxiously as his four-year-old daughter sang to a plastic Hindu goddess doll, I wondered where families like his could go.
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