Bangladesh is primarily an agro-based country where rice, wheat, maize, jute and various vegetables are considered significant and popular crops for farmers — in terms of ensuring both food security and economic benefits. Unfortunately, changing climate, rising sea levels and other anthropogenic factors are forcing a vast area of Bangladesh’s coastal zone to remain barren due to the salinity of arable lands. Consequently, a vast area of saline-prone land in the coastal zone remains barren during the dry season (November through May), as popular crops cannot tolerate the salt. Overcoming the hurdles, coastal farmers, with the support of the government and nongovernmental organizations, are now farming sunflowers and benefiting from the alternative crop. Sunflowers are saline-resistant and grow quickly, offering a stable opportunity for income generation to farmers who can no longer cultivate more saline-sensitive crops. Asim Chandra Shikhari, a farmer from the coastal district of Patuakhali, cultivated sunflowers on around 3 acres of land for the first time during the last dry season. “I didn’t cultivate anything earlier in the dry season, for a long time, before cultivating sunflower. I harvested about 75 maunds [1 maund is 37.3 kilograms, or 82.2 pounds] of sunflower from that cultivation, which ensured me about 170,000 taka [$1,550],” he added. Inspired from there, in the current 2023-24 season, he is cultivating sunflowers on about nine acres of land, and his neighboring 130 farmers cultivated sunflowers on about 100 acres of land. He told Mongabay, “When I tried planting rice in this salty soil,…This article was originally published on Mongabay
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