How climate change threatens farmers in Bangladesh

April 21, 2016 | Web First
J. Neufeld | Special to Canadian Mennonite

Masum Khandakar is a Bangladeshi rice farmer with a craggy face and a jutting white beard that flares as wide as the wings of his collared shirt. His voice goes high when his emotions overwhelm him. That is what happened one day in late December when he stood up during a community meeting inside a dimly lit schoolhouse in the town of Kotalipara and described what Koinonia had done for him. “Before Koinonia came, I could not eat one full meal a day,” he said, his voice cracking. “My fields were under water. There was no work.”

Koinonia is a humanitarian organization run by a partnership of Christian churches in Bangladesh. Khandakar benefitted from a six-year work-for-food project funded by World Relief Canada, a Canadian Foodgrains Bank partner. The project provided people with food while they worked to re-excavate a network of clogged drainage canals. Khandakar supervised a team of 45 workers to dig out a canal with buckets, picks and shovels. Once cleared, the canals drained standing water that had swamped people’s fields, allowing the farmers to get back to growing food for their families. Khandakar even managed to save enough money to buy a bicycle rickshaw that he pedals around town, hauling loads for a fee.

But Khandakar is now worried about a new problem. Earlier in the year, he put his tongue to the water in the canal that irrigates his field and tasted salt. Although his home is about a hundred kilometres from the coast, a surge of salt water had pushed far inland along the network of waterways that drain into the Bay of Bengal. He knows that if the soil on his tiny plot of land becomes too salty, he’ll no longer be able to grow rice.

Soil salinization due to rising sea levels is one of the many ways climate change is threatening the lives of people in Bangladesh. On the day Khandakar stood up at the community meeting, delegates from around the world were gathering 8,000 kilometres away in Paris to make a plan for how the world would respond to the greatest crisis of our time: climate change.

Khandakar’s country has more at stake than most other nations at the climate summit. Bangladesh is a low-lying delta of rich alluvial soil washed down over millennia from the Himalayan Mountains. The land is perfect for agriculture, but most of it is less than ten metres above sea level. Since rising sea levels are influenced by factors including gravity and human activity, and will be uneven around the world, it’s hard to predict what Bangladesh will look like in 50 years.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change predicts a sea-level rise of nearly a metre by the end of this century. Other estimates are higher. A one-metre sea-level rise would submerge at least 15 percent of Bangladesh’s landmass and displace millions of people. That’s a serious problem in a country where the population density is already 1,220 people per square kilometre. Every inch of land is already taxed.

Rony Kumarsaha, a police officer in Kotalipara, said the contest for land is a factor in many of the crimes he investigates.

Recently, the government of Bangladesh integrated climate-change adaptation into its poverty-alleviation strategies. But the Bangladesh government alone isn’t capable of addressing the magnitude of the problem.

“The government cannot solve this problem,” according to Rathindranath Biswas, an agriculture officer for the Kotalipara district. He said he wished he could provide training and seeds for farmers to grow newly developed varieties of saline-resistant rice, but he didn’t have the budget for it. And in some areas near the coast, the soil has already become too salty even for salt-tolerant crops.

In Paris, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau pledged $2.65 billion to help developing countries adapt to climate change and reduce emissions. That’s more than double what the previous government contributed, but significantly less than what some other developed nations have promised.

The work of small-holder farmers like Khandakar, who manage the health of their soil, is essential in the struggle for food security in a rapidly changing world. Canada has prioritized food security as a key international development objective, and Bangladesh is one of its focus countries for development aid. But Canada’s aid for agriculture declined by 30 percent over the past three years.

Through its Good Soil Campaign, the Foodgrains Bank has been urging Canada to increase its support for small-holder farmers like Khandakar. Executive director Jim Cornelius believes increasing Canada’s aid for agriculture is one way this country could respond to the climate crisis. “We think this is one of the most effective ways of reducing poverty and hunger,” he said. “It’s more inclusive.” He cited a World Bank study that showed growth in the agriculture sector helps more poor people than growth in many other sectors.

Another way would be to reduce Canada’s energy consumption. Each year the average Canadian consumes the energy equivalent of about 7,000 kilograms of oil and contributes 14 metric tonnes of carbon to the atmosphere. That’s 34 times the energy consumption of a person in Bangladesh.

In December 2015, J. Neufeld travelled to Bangladesh on a trip paid for by the Canadian Foodgrains Bank. During his stay, he made a short flight to the north of the country. A man who sat next to him on the plane, a teacher at a community college, glanced over his shoulder as he was browsing through a local newspaper and pointed to an article about the Paris climate summit. “You are a big polluter,” he said, “and we are suffering.” Neufeld wonders: As Mennonites who are concerned with justice, what is our responsibility to people like Masum Khandakar, who will bear the brunt of climate change in coming years?

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