Farming on Water to Prevent the Effects of Climate
Change
By Amy
Yee
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| Villagers in northwest Bangladesh tending a floating farm. Amy Yee |
CHARBHANGURA,
Bangladesh — Each year the brown
waters of the Gumani river swell during the summer monsoon, creeping over the
surrounding fields to flood Charbhangura, a village of 2,500 people in the
Pabna district of northwest Bangladesh.
From July to October the waters can rise at least 10 feet. The
trunks of trees more than 30 feet away from the dry season riverbed show
watermarks waist high. When the fields flood, the village’s farmers have no
work.
“There is water all around,” said Hafiza Khatun, 25, a mother of
two whose family income used to vanish for six months of the year when her farm
laborer husband had nothing to do. “There was no happiness.”
But three years ago, Ms. Khatun was trained by Shidhulai
Swanirvar Sangstha, a Bangladeshi nonprofit organization, to tend an unusual
source of food and income: a floating farm with a duck coop, fish enclosures
and vegetable garden moored by rope to the riverbank.
Five to 10 women can share the structure, splitting about
130,000 taka, or about $1,700, a year. Shidhulai supplies seeds, fish and duck
feed and other materials that cost about 10,000 taka.
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| This duck coop can house 100 ducks and is equipped with a small solar panel to power lights inside. Amy Yee |
Climate
change threatens to worsen the severity and duration of floods
in low-lying Bangladesh.
Floating farms — and produce that can flourish in flood
conditions — are a way to help Bangladeshis live with rising waters.
“There is big demand for solutions for climate change-affected
areas,” said Mohammed Rezwan, the founder and executive director of Shidhulai.
With the extra income from selling eggs, fish and vegetables,
Ms. Khatun started saving money in a bank for the first time, bought a bed to
keep her and her family off wet ground in their dirt-floored home, and helps
her husband support the family.
Ducks quacked loudly as Ms. Khatun gathered eggs in the coop,
ushering some of them outside to the “duck run,” a stretch of water between
fish enclosures. She had never raised ducks or fish before the training, Ms.
Khatun said, but “nothing has been very difficult.”
In northern Bangladesh, agricultural land is regularly flooded
as rivers are engorged by the annual Himalayan snow melt and monsoon rains. In
one of the world’s most densely populated countries, where 156 million people
live in an area the size of Iowa, thousands are left with no way to earn a
living. Many migrate to already overcrowded cities, contributing to urban
blight.
Mr. Rezwan founded Shidhulai as a 22-year-old architecture
graduate in 1998. That year, disastrous flooding in Bangladesh killed 700
people and left 21 million homeless.
Initially, Mr. Rezwan focused on building schools on boats, and
worked to ensure that thousands of children would not fall behind when roads
were blocked by floodwaters.
To date, the nonprofit’s fleet, which now numbers 22 schools,
five health clinics and 10 libraries, has provided continuity of education and
other services for more than 70,000 children in villages isolated by seasonal
floods.
Four years ago it started to also build floating farms for
villagers, and particularly the landless poor, to help them eke out a living
during the months of floods.
So far there are 40 floating farms that are worked by about 300
women: Mr. Rezwan has ambitious plans to create 400, to serve 3,000 women and
their families in the next few years.
He also argues that the floating farm concept could help other
riverine developing countries, as has been the case with floating schools.
“They have the potential to be replicated around the world,” he said.
Shidhulai’s school boats have been copied in several other
countries, including the Philippines, Cambodia, Vietnam, Nigeria and Zambia.
A floating farm measures about 56 feet long and 16 feet wide.
The coop can house 100 ducks and is equipped with a small solar panel to power
lights inside. It floats on empty oil drums, plastic containers and a bamboo
platform.
The coop is attached to bamboo rods that make up two rows of
fish enclosures where tilapia is farmed in blue plastic nets. The outer rails
of bamboo support the garden. They hold old plastic jugs cut in half where
villagers grow cucumbers, beans and gourds in soil and natural fertilizer.
Mr. Rezwan took his initial concept for the farms from floating
gardens that had been used in southern Bangladesh for hundreds of years. Those
gardens layered water hyacinths — a type of weed — over bamboo structures and
topped the resulting artificial island with soil to grow vegetables.
The design had to be modified however, to suit local conditions.
The southern model didn’t work in the north, where heavier rains waterlogged
the vegetable beds and it was difficult to create drainage. Water hyacinth was
also less plentiful in the north.
The duck coop, originally built on a bamboo platform, now rests
atop more-buoyant plastic oil drums — recycled and found materials are
enthusiastically used alongside locally grown bamboo.
Villagers
can now build the entire structure for the equivalent of $260, which is covered
by Shidhulai, Mr. Rezwan said.
