Category: Bangladesh

Food and nutritional security is one of the major challenges that the smallholders and other marginalised communities face in the era of global health and environmental problems such as the pandemics and climate change, including biodiversity loss. Smallholder farmers are now adopting practices that reduce the impact of climate change impacts and more importantly, the impact of pandemic as the world is now witnessing. With the promotion of farm diversity using the Integrated Farming System approach, farmers like Rozina Begum in Bangladesh are emerging resilient and are ensuring their and their families’ food and nutritional security are being met. Rozina Begum and her husband, Md. Digonto are a smallholder couple. They live in Kornoher village in Paba, Rajshahi district. With just 0.13 ha of cultivable land, they were finding it difficult to meet the needs of the family that has two children.Rozina Begum, who joined the SAFBIN facilitated Smallholder Farmers’ Collective in her village, was eager to do something to contribute to the family income. She decided to diversify her small farm by adding duck farming and vegetable cultivation in her homestead. The programme supported her with 65 ducklings to help her start her duck farm. Now all the ducks have started laying eggs. She collects 25-30 eggs daily from her farm. While eggs and meat are now being consumed regularly in her family, they are also able to sell them locally as well. She has sold around 400 eggs till now and earned 4,000 BDT. Now they are selling ducks to the local community and have already sold 55 ducks and earned 13,750 BDT while adding 45 new born ducklings to her own farm. With the nutrition garden, Rozina cultivated different types of vegetables year-round. She has sold 751 Kg vegetables and earned 15,030 BDT.From the time Rozina got involved with the programme, she has been able to work through to see palpable changes in her life. She now leads the way to demonstrate to her fellow farmers how farm diversification helps to emerge resilient and become self-reliant.

Four years ago, when SAFBIN started working with 405 smallholder families in Tanore of Rajshahi, Bangladesh,  increasing agricultural production in this drought-prone Barind region was a challenging task. But farmers like Ms. Akhtara Begum (42) accepted that challenge. She is a progressive farmer from Chimna village. Her husband Md. Ruhul Amin (47) inherits a piece of ancestral homeland and a 33 decimal farmland. He leases another 17 decimal farmland on his own. Besides, he used to run different seasonal small businesses for a living. Paddy was the only crop that Akhtara’s family used to grow on their farmland. But their production was not sufficient to supply rice for more than five-six months of the year. Like the other food items, rice had to be bought from the market for about half of the year.Akhtara’s life changed when  she became a part of SAFBIN. She began to learn about more possibilities from her farm, things that she never even heard of. The best part was, Akhtara never limited herself only to learning, she also practiced them in real life. For example, after learning about crop diversification, she started cultivating three crops (paddy, mung-bean, and mustard) a year instead of paddy twice a year. That gave her more production and more profit. It also ensures food security far more than before. Not only this, during the dry season when her land used to remain fallow, she cultivated mung beans as an extra crop. Which makes her land fertile as well.Inspired and supported by SAFBIN, she began using her fallow backyard for year-round vegetable cultivation. She also started raising native chickens on her farm. This added more variety and nutrition to her family’s diet. Additionally, it helped to her reduce some of the extra cost of buying food. But due to a poor marketing system, she failed to sell the surplus and bring in extra profit. The same thing happened to the other farmers in her area. But they had no idea what to do to resolve the issue. Marketing is a common problem for small farmers in Bangladesh. There are many reasons behind this. One of the major reasons is the small amount of individual production on small farms. In most cases, wholesalers or even retailers are reluctant to buy those small quantities. And it is neither feasible nor cost-effective to take that small quantity of products to the marketplace for selling. The long-standing problem of marketing surplus products discourages small farmers from producing more.To address the issue, SAFBIN farmers took up community marketing initiative in Tanore. Three production clusters were formed in this area. Each cluster consists of three villages. Among the SHFC members, one was selected as a trader in each cluster. Akhtara and her husband were nominated by their cluster members as the cluster-trader.She was supported with some essential equipment like a digital weighing scale, baskets, carets, etc. from SAFBIN. This motivated Akhtara and her husband to initiate their job as cluster-trader. SAFBIN staff guided them to prepare a strategic plan in that regard. At first, Akhtara and her husband met with cluster members from three villages and collected information about available products. Then they visited the surrounding markets and conducted an informal survey on product demand. They analyzed that information and enlisted the most demanding products. They had prepared separate schedules for community markets for three different villages. Depending on the availability of the product, a community market is held once or twice a week for each village. It is scheduled either on the previous evening of the weekly bazaar day or in the early morning of the same day.