Fighting the white curse: Growing crops in salty soil

When Bashonti Mondol started planting rice on a plot of land next to her house in the remote coastal village of Majgurkhali, she was ridiculed. They hadn’t been able to grow rice there for decades.

“People had not seen rice grow here in more than 40 years,” Bashonti said. “The salt killed everything.”

In Majgurkhali, a village in Bangladesh’s southwestern Satkhira district, on the edge of the Bay of Bengal, most people have given up traditional farming. Rising salinity, compounded by manmade embankments and shrimp farms, has left the once-fertile land barren and inhospitable.

The pancake-flat terrain is a mosaic of shrimp ponds stretching as far as the eye can see, the brackish water glistening in the sunlight. During the winter months, when water levels drop, the salt is visible as a white layer on the soil. Locals call it the white curse.

Maksud Ali, a 55-year-old villager, said he was forced to give up rice farming and become a day labourer many years ago. “Nothing grows,” he said. “There’s just too much salt in the water and in the ground.”

The high salinity has not only forced changes in economic activity, it has also had a negative impact on the health and quality of life of coastal communities. Studies have shown an increase in cardiovascular diseases, diarrhoea, and reproductive health problems in the coastal belt. Salinity has been linked to cognitive impairment among schoolchildren.

Majgurkhali wasn’t always like this.

Bashonti, 42 years old, says she was told by her grandparents that water in the rivers and canals in the area used to be sweet fifty years ago. Growing, eating and selling rice was a way of life. As a child, Bashonti remembers going to huge harvest festivals, where the whole village would be celebrating.

As sea levels rise due to climate change, salinity is creeping inland. Cyclone Sidr in 2007 and Cyclone Aila in 2009 inundated the land with saline water. Embankments that were built to stave off the rising sea and increasingly violent storms in the 1970s trapped the saltwater in the local waterways. Unsustainable shrimp farming exacerbated the problem. The shrimp farmers dug canals to bring salt water, which seeped into the soil, poisoning it.

For coastal communities, the loss of rice cultivation has deep cultural significance. For most rural villages in Bangladesh, rice is a way of life – a symbol of the strength and well-being of communities.

For Bashonti, it also has serious implications at home. “If you have to buy rice from the market, you don’t have much money left to buy anything else,” she said. Bashonti’s husband is a day labourer and doesn’t bring in a lot of money, so it’s often a struggle to feed the family.

She was stuck, though. The shrimp farms have doomed villagers like Bashonti to a vicious cycle of poverty by creating a high barrier to entry. It takes money to lease large tracts of land to create shrimp ghers (enclosures). As a result, shrimp farming is dominated by absentee landlords and wealthy business people.

Shrimp ghers in Majgurkhali, Satkhira district, southwestern Bangladesh. © BRAC 2024

Bashonti found strength in numbers. She was already part of BRAC’s ultra poor graduation programme, and working with others in the village to improve her situation. She teamed up with two friends, Ratna Mridha and Kalpana Rani Sardar, along with two other women from a neighbouring village, to attend a seven-day training on combining rice cultivation with fish farming. They then leased 3 bighas (1.6 acres) of land near the village.

“We advised them to grow salt-tolerant rice during the dry season and farm fish during the monsoon,” said Aroti Das, branch manager at BRAC’s Ultra-Poor Graduation (UPG) programme. “We consulted the local agriculture extension officer, who arranged the seeds.”

(From left to right) Bashonti, Kalpana and Ratna at work on their land. © BRAC 2024

Bashonti’s group failed the first time. The soil was too salty and the rice plants died.

Aroti then spoke to the extension office again, and sourced a variety of rice called BRRI-47, which could tolerate even higher salinity. Instead of planting the rice directly in the field, Bashonti and her friends grew the seedlings on a different patch of land and transplanted them to the paddy field. They used a machine to bore holes in the ground and used the groundwater to irrigate the field.

This time, they got a crop. “We grew 48 maunds (1,920 kilograms) of rice,” Bashonti said. “We sold a third of it and kept the rest to eat.”

Bashonti said her group spent approximately 8,000 taka (US$75) per bigha (0.62 acres) and produced rice worth around 25,000 taka (US$230) per bigha. Then, in the rainy season, they switched to fish cultivation, farming salt-tolerant fish such as bhetki (barramundi). The decomposing stalks of the rice plants provided food for the fish.

The mood in the village quickly changed. People started to come to Bashonti and her friends for advice.

(From left to right) Ratna Mridha, Bashonti Mondol and Kalpana Rani Sardar now grow salt-tolerant rice like BRRI-47 during the dry season and farm fish during the monsoon. © BRAC 2024

Bashonti now plans to increase rice production next season, and her group is trying to arrange funds to buy boring machinery. They want to expand their rice production, but are balancing the concern that the salinity level will continue to rise and BRRI-47 has a limit which it can withstand.

Bashonti’s situation is not uncommon now across Bangladesh. The area in coastal Bangladesh now affected by high salinity is the size of Lebanon, and fast growing. Bashonti and her group are an example, though, that adaptation is possible. These women have already achieved what was thought impossible, with very limited resources. The white curse is going to get a lot worse before it gets better – but the people living with it can adapt to it with the right support.

Climate adaptation funding needs to focus on the real challenges people are facing now, like destruction of agricultural livelihoods. It also needs to recognise that people like Bashonti are going to need much more than a one-shot solution. BRRI-47, and any climate solution, will eventually not be able to cope. What Bashonti will need is constant support to adapt – through better information about how the climate is changing, in the short and long term; advice on which seeds and which techniques will work best; and access to financial mechanisms that enable her to take chances, invest, and be insured through shocks.

The good thing is – all we need to do is provide that support. As the people of Majgurkhali will now attest, people like Bashonti are more than capable of figuring out the rest.

The Ultra-Poor Graduation programme is recognised worldwide as the pioneer of the Graduation approach. Graduation is a comprehensive, time-bound, integrated and sequenced set of interventions that supports households to progress along a pathway out of poverty. Over 2.2 million households in Bangladesh have lifted themselves out of poverty through the approach to date.

To learn more about BRAC’s work in supporting communities adapt to the climate crisis, please visit www.brac.net/climate