Notes
Foreword
1. See Paprocki (2018) for the formulation “adaptation regime”; also Cons (2018) and Vaughn (2017) for further examples of the power and occlusions generated by climate change–oriented analysis of prospects for rural development.
Introduction
1. See https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/DT.ODA.ALLD.CD?end=2018&locations=BD&start=2011&view=chart. In 2016, the Local Government Initiative on Climate Change (Logic) was launched with an initial budget of US$20 million (UNCDF 2016). These are only two examples of the many climate change funds going to Bangladesh, where the rural annual wage is generally no more than US$610 (estimated on twelve consecutive months of four thousand taka per month, excluding periods of no work and no pay, or gender discriminate wages for women) and the total government revenue for 2015 was BDT 2.77 million, approximately US$35.2 million (BBS 2015, 239).
2. Bangladesh also engages in internal colonialism against indigenous peoples (adivasis) who are also subject to colonizing narratives of Bangladeshi nationalism, but this is beyond the focus of the current book. For more information, see Lamia Karim, “Pushed to the Margins: Adivasi Peoples in Bangladesh and the Case of Kalpana Chakma,” Contemporary South Asia 7 (3): 301–16.
3. Colonial anthropologists also played a part in promoting and establishing words such as progressive and primitive, explaining “native” phenomenon benchmarked against European conceptions of normativity (Asad 1991). Anthropologists, from Malinowski to Bourdieu, benefitted from the patronage of European colonial powers; colonial discourse and practice “was always part of the reality anthropologists sought to understand, and of the way they sought to understand it” (Asad 1991, 315).
4. Foucault uses government in its broadest sense, meaning anyone in a position of power, from political head to magistrate, educator, or patriarch (Butler 2002).
5. Several anthropologists have made use of the Foucauldian conceptualization of power, knowledge, and discourse to deconstruct modernity and how colonial categories shaped colonial institutions, practices, and ultimately colonial subjects; see, for example, the works of Cohn (1996; 1990), Dirks (2001; 1987), Asad (1991), Comaroff and Comaroff (1991), and Rosaldo (1989; 1980).
6. For detailed environmental histories of the southeastern Comilla, Noakhali, and Barisal districts of Bangladesh, see Iqbal (2010). For West Bengal, see Bhattacharyya (2018) on Calcutta and the Hooghly River, Jalais (2010b) and Mukhopadhyay (2017) on the southern Sundarbans islands, Lahiri-Dutt and Samanta (2013) on Damodar embankments and chars, and D’Souza (2006) on colonial capitalism and irrigation in the Orissa delta.
7. This builds and extends on Mosse’s (2005) ethnography of development policy where he shows how sustaining a particular theory as justified and legitimate involves rearranging expectations of causality. “Participation” is reduced to something achieved through more community-based groups; “empowerment” is reduced to extending rural credit to women.
8. This work draws on Latour’s concept of translation “as a relation that does not transport causality but induces two mediators into coexisting [with each other]. . . . Translations [exist] between mediators that may generate traceable associations” (Latour 2005, 108) and is now increasingly also used in environmental anthropology (see, e.g., Di Giminiani and Haines 2020).
9. The names of all people, organizations, and places (e.g., Nodi, Lonanodi, Dhanmarti, and Shobuj town) have been changed to protect the privacy of the communities discussed in the following pages.
Chapter One
1. See S. Huq (2016) for a general overview of climate finance in Bangladesh.
2. Rennell sent Richards, Martin, and Ritchie to survey the Sundarbans rivers for these maps.
3. Rennell’s journal entries for 26 June and 29 June, 1764, in La Touche, 1910. Also, see maps IOR/X/1259; /1260; /1261 on maps surveyed in 1813–15 of Sagar Island, Diamond Harbor, and the Sundarbans around the Hooghly River that show many “salt works” in forested areas. Rennell’s later works include surveys of the “salt districts” of Bengal located in the Sundarbans to regulate revenues and jurisdiction (Rennell 1803).
4. The Sundarbans was first attached to the Hooghly District in 1757 and the 24 Parganas in 1793. By 1881, Khulna was a part of the Presidency division including Calcutta and Jessore, now in West Bengal India.
5. For a detailed discussion on colonial “wastelands” see Eaton (1990), Jalais (2010b), and Mukhopadhay (2017).
6. The first British effort to clear the Sundarbans for agriculture was in 1770 by Claude Russel, the collector general of 24 Parganas, through rent-free lessees for the period of forest clearance and cultivation called “Patitabad Taluks” (Lahiri 1936, 66).
7. Similarly, approximately three million people died during the 1943 Bengal famine as Prime Minister Winston Churchill took decisions to export grain to feed WWII troops at the expense of local food security (Mukerjee 2010). See also chap. 4.
8. Through this revenue-based acquirement of land, zamindars became instruments of government for the British (Mosse 2003). Indigenous custom continued in parallel with new titling processes required by the colonial administration, which led to the ambiguity of responsibilities that was further exacerbated by complex processes of access to land and water that continue today (Baker 1984; Dirks 1986; Ranajit Guha 1963; Mosse 2003; Price 1996; Scott 1998).
9. See also Iqbal (2010), Bhattacharyya (2018), D’Souza (2006), Lahiri-Dutt and Samanta (2013), Mukhopadhyay (2017), Jalais (2010b), and Pargiter (2020) for more detailed historical analysis of the Permanent Settlement Act in the Bengal delta.
10. The maps highlight the importance of using cadastral surveys as a means of controlling taxation (Scott 1998, 44–46). In 1822 and 1823, all forest lands between rivers were divided into bocks and numbered as Sundarbans lots to be awarded as leases (Lahiri 1936, 67). The Sundarbans lots (222) that describe Nodi from this period are also described in detail in Pargiter (2020, 142–43). Revenue collectors sought to obtain taxes from these plots between 1828–1836 by updating the revenue roll (153). These lots are also visible in Tassin’s (1841) New Bengal Atlas.
11. See Letters dated 16th June 1831 from the Bengal Government to Court of directors in the Bengal Revenue Board collection (1836), as well as Paragraph 147 (page 17C) in the same volume. For more information about the 24 Parganas and deforestation in the West Bengal Sundarbans, also see Mukhopadhyay (2017) who discusses in detail the Dampier-Hodges line and the importance of the new Sundarbans commissioner in the 1830s to demarcate the boundary of Sundarbans for revenue purposes.
12. Bengal Revenue Department (1817, 2–3) contains several such letters of how the land beyond the Pottaks, seen as separate from the Permanent settlement, were expanded without settling revenue. See No 13. Letter dated 29 November 1814, paras. 51–55; letter dated 11 June 1814. From the Board of Revenue to Governor General Francis, letter dated from Fort William on 5 March 1814, Bengal Board of Revenue to the Governor General of Bengal. IOR/F/4/501/11980 British Library.
13. Similar accounts of rapid forest conversion are found in the Khulna District Gazetteer of 1908 and the 1911 Census of India (O’Malley 1908, 93; Census of India 1913, 191).
14. This appears different from the West Bengal, 24 Parganas Sundarbans where the Sundarbans as a wasteland was a means of ensuring it remains as state property (Mukhopadhyay 2017).
15. Henckell, the Jessore Magistrate in 1780, was unable to afford these repairs and applied for funds from the Board of Revenue to provide £1500 for takavi advances to the cultivators and £600 to repair the embankments in his newly “reclaimed” Sundarbans (Hunter 1875b, 277). For further details about what is known about embankments in this period for all of Bengal, see The Bengal Embankment Manual of 1873 (Harrison 1875).
16. In the talukdar (landowner) Prawnkishen Dutt’s appeal against the Revenue Board, he claims that the board confiscated land that he and his family spent significant personal expenses to convert from mangrove into arable paddy land for the Pottak (grant) they had bought from the administration in 1782. Among these costs was that of raising embankments, dividing the lands into separate settlements (mouza) and procuring tenants (Bengal Revenue Board 1836). Although Dutta lost the case, it contains one of the few references of the landowner paying the cost of embankments as a private cost. See the letter dated 30 April 1836, paras. 142–47, Bengal Revenue Board (1836).
17. Using the case of the Orissa delta, D’Souza (2006, 52) suggests that colonial capitalism under the Company recast the previously flood-dependent agrarian regime into a flood-vulnerable landscape. That is, the zamindari system required land to be realized in a manner that compelled the Company administration to treat deltaic inundation as a calamitous event rather than a geomorphologic process. In my own research I found that the East India Company acknowledged the importance of “flood dependence”—evident in the earlier statements and in the mapping of lands under “inundation.” D’Souza also points out that embankments are damaging to Orissa’s deltaic ecology (102). In Bengal, there are differences between earthen bandhs that stopped seasonal saline incursion during Company rule, and that of watertight embankments during the British Raj that prevented beneficial monsoon inundation and instead cast them as “natural calamity.” These different types of embankments further highlight the importance of different forms of water—salt and fresh, dry and monsoon flows.
18. The Bengal Embankment Manual of 1873 provided guidance on the extent and delegation of responsibilities of the embankments of lower Bengal regarding the “State,” while the Embankment Act II of 1882 later placed the construction and maintenance of embankments under the authority of the lieutenant governor. Both legal documents show how the management of Bengal’s embankments was shifting toward a more centralized responsibility by the colonial state (Ingles 1911).
19. This is in stark contrast to the lived colonial realities of export policies and British-induced famines in the subcontinent where these same “subjects” are dehumanized, devalued, and expendable as part of greater colonial agendas (Davis 2007; Mukerjee 2010).
20. The landlord suspended rent collection from his tenants, sending them a cash advance for seed instead. Upon hearing this, the rent collector immediately asked for a government revenue installment and threatened to arrest the landlord if he did not pay. “Private Memo, a European asking an Indian landlord about the Famine Commission. Benares,” dated 12 December 1878 (Caird 1878).
21. The 1793 Permanent Settlement Act did not include the reclaimed lands of the Sundarbans and its embankments were therefore not included in the 1882 Embankment Act II (Ingles 1911, 46–47). Embankments were seen as inappropriate for Jessore; see appendix A (Harrison 1875). It was not until the amendment in the Bengal Embankment (Sundarbans) Bill of 1914 that the Sundarbans embankments were also given the same rights as other Bengal embankments in 1882 (Government of Bengal 1914).
22. Brammer states that it is a common myth that borsha floods deposit fertile silt on Bangladesh’s floodplain, including that of the Ganges tidal floodplain where the southwest coastal zone is situated. He refers to soil surveys from 1965 that highlight how when soils are flooded by rainwater, chemical reactions take place that destroy clay and liberate the nutrients they hold, making topsoil acidic. “Blue-green algae living in clear water (through which sunshine penetrates) fix nitrogen that plants can use. Silty water would prevent or severely limit both these fertility benefits” (Brammer 2020). My Bangladeshi interlocutors, like Sadhu Kaka and other Bangladeshis that have been part of Tidal River Management (chaps. 2 and 3) maintain that borsha floods fertilize the land while also gradually elevating the floodplains and enriching natural vegetation.
23. The Partition made East Bengal a part of the dominion of Pakistan and it was renamed East Pakistan in 1955 and then Bangladesh in 1971. For more information on Partition, see Chatterji (2002), Sirajul Islam (1997), Hill (2008), and Van Schendel (2009; 2001).
24. In Bengali-speaking East Pakistan civil-service posts were mainly staffed with trained West Pakistanis, usually Punjabis and Bihari (Lewis 2011).
25. Some scholars suggest that the Coastal Embankment Project (CEP) was constructed to facilitate the Green Revolution, or to “transform” the region from a food secure to a food-exporting region (Paprocki and Cons 2014, 6). Although the CEP was built to stop salinity intrusion and promote aman rice—there is little to suggest that it was built with the aim of facilitating the Green Revolution. For example, Choudhury, Paul, and Paul (2004) write that the Green Revolution would not have been able to take place without embankments, but this does not mean that embankments were made in the 1960s solely to intensify agricultural production and promote exports. Indeed, aman rice HYV varieties were not developed until the mid-1980s in Bangladesh (chap. 4).
26. It was personally organized by UN representative and American citizen Huntington Gilchrist who supported Ayub Khan. The mission was headed by Julius Krug, former US secretary of the interior (Hanlon, Roy, and Hulme 2016).
27. Pakistan was the main bulwark of land separating socialist India from the neighboring communist states of the Soviet Union and China (Cohen 2004, 34, 302).
28. During my visit to the National Archives of Bangladesh, there was a notable lack of continuity of records, and very little in the Jessore District records on the period from partition to 1971. The archivist explained that since the capital of Pakistan was first Karachi and then Islamabad, most of the records from Calcutta had been transferred and stored there.
29. For an excellent description of Bangladesh’s modern history, please see Lewis (2011, 76) for details.
30. India’s unilateral construction of the Farakka Barrage with the reduced inflow of freshwater into Bangladesh combined with billion tons of sediment unable to flood the plains suggests that both transboundary waterflows and the construction of embankments contribute to the silting up of the delta.
31. In the Jessore District, permanent jalabaddho is the largest problem. Experimentations using indigenous solutions to break the embankment in certain places have been used to remove inundation, currently referred to in development projects as Tidal River Management.
32. There is extensive literature on this. See Adnan (1994); Boyce (1990); Clayton (1994); Elahi and Rogge (1991); Hofer and Messerli (2006); H. Hossain, Dodge, and Abed (1992); M. Hossain, Islam, and Saha (1987); Hughes, Adnan, and Clayton (1994); A. Rahman (1992); Sklar and Dulu (1994); Zaman (1993); Shaw (1992).
33. Scott suggests that interventions fail when there is a weak civil society. It is unclear what role civil society played during the colonial period when voices like that of Sir Arthur Cotton were silenced. During the CEP, when East Pakistan was ruled by West Pakistan, protests included the 1952 Bengali Language Movement and the 1971 Independence War. The failure of the Flood Action Plan shows the importance of civil society.
Chapter Two
1. Union Parishad is the lowest level of local government. The next tier is the subdistrict, Upazila.
2. The chairman is the elected democratic representative of the Union Parishad.
3. This work draws on Latour’s concept of translation “as a relation that does not transport causality but induces two mediators into coexisting [with each other]. . . . Translations [exist] between mediators that may generate traceable associations” (Latour 2005, 108).
4. “Adaptation” generally tends to anticipate the adverse effects of climate change and to take actions that may prevent or minimize the damage they can cause or encourage people to take advantage of opportunities that may arise. Examples of this tend to be infrastructure solutions or changes in land-use practice. Climate resilience was often used to define the capacity for a socioecological system to maintain functioning in the face of external stresses imposed by climatic change, focusing on shock absorbing and self-renewal, and is often used in Bangladesh to focus on increasing the “resilience” of individuals and communities to deal with stresses in their everyday lives.
5. He explained: “When constructed, the embankments stopped the sediment from reaching the floodplains. Now the silt deposits in the river system. On top of this, Farakka Barrage has led to reduced water flows to flush out silt in the dry season, so there is more silt in the rivers further contributing to problems of water logging [drainage congestion].” While conducting interviews, I often heard various segments of the population, researchers, and government officials make this argument. With the reduced inflow of water due to the Farakka barrage, the tributary rivers no longer have the force to carry the silt all the way down to the bay, which has directly contributed to greater sedimentation rates in the delta (Hill 2008, 179; Swain 1996).
6. Many foreigners who have worked and lived in Bangladesh for long periods (some more than four decades) speak Bangla and know of the longstanding problems of siltation and embankments and the performance of development events and are increasingly writing about these issues internationally.
7. Baviskar (2019) points out how there was a lack of opposition to dam projects in India in the 2000s compared to the 1990s, similar to how there were strong social movements against FAP, yet not against CEIP. She suggests that this has had do to with NGOs working against such projects with legal and technical means, while local communities are compensated and thus are not as vocally critical.
8. The Asian Development Bank tried to carry out a project based on the grassroots breaching of embankments in Jessore District, called Tidal River Management. The project was highly contentious as it was based on embankments being breached strategically in several places, but failed to implement the necessary relocation and compensation program due to the difficulties of understanding which of the many actors (landowners, sharecroppers, tenants, those living on it) should be compensated for their loss and how (Shahidul Islam and Kibria 2006).
Chapter Three
1. I introduced myself as a PhD student from the UK and made it clear I was not part of any donor initiative.
2. The subregion of the Ganges tidal floodplain, which Nodi is part of, is thus different from the forested islands in West Bengal that Mukhopadhyay (2017, 127) and Jalais (2010b, 7) describe, where tidal rivers appear to be saline throughout the year.
3. With the 1947 partition, Bangladesh’s four-thousand-kilometer border with India crossed fifty-four shared rivers, from which China, Nepal, and India can all divert water before it reaches Bangladesh (Hill 2008).
4. In the 1960s the average annual daily minimum flow was 1,920 m3/s. The construction of Farakka Barrage reduced the flow to 920 m3/s; in the 1990s it dropped again to 425 m3/s (Z. Khan et al. 2015b, 35).
5. These narratives to justify aquaculture to “feed the population” continue to this day. At the international conference described in chap. 2, a bideshi presenter suggested, “Aquaculture must more than double by 2050 to satisfy the projected demand for fish and South Asia is the hotspot for this.” The statement was directly contested by the Bangladeshis in the audience and a few hours later, the secretary at the Ministry of Fisheries and Livestock asked: “Who is responsible for the coastal zone? Bangladesh is earning foreign exchange by exporting shrimp. We produce bagda [tiger prawn], but do we ever taste it?” Aquaculture may produce higher yields in the short term, but most Bangladeshis are unable to afford and eat bagda. The global trend to increase fish production through aquaculture may in fact reduce both the availability of, and access to, the wild capture fisheries so essential for the poor. In addition, it uses scarce land resources to produce cash crops for exports, land that could have been used for agricultural and cereal production, thus undermining local food availability. I will return to this subject in chap. 4.
6. Lewis (2011, 152) further points out that the Bangladesh government’s Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers favored bagda for exports over golda.
7. For a comprehensive review and discussion about supply chain governance, agrarian transformation, and the role of certifications of commercial aquaculture globally, see Saidul Islam (2014).
8. Saidul Islam (2014) suggests that it is a myth that shrimp farming causes greater salinity than paddy farming. While this may be the case for freshwater golda, it is not the case for brackish bagda.
9. As Bakul points out: “Instead of looking at what made the embankment break, they [donors] are now blaming climate change for the salinity in these areas.”
10. Khal dakal remains a serious problem in Bangladesh irrespective of aquaculture. As the canals also silt, landowners may fill up canals to extend their own landholding (Daily Star 2020).
11. Cultivation requires significantly less on-farm labor (Swapan and Gavin 2011). While Islam suggests this is a “myth,” the survey I conducted in Nodi made it clear that local people were not hired to work in the ghers because of risk of theft, and that the work is less labor intensive than paddy cultivation.
12. See Pokrant (2014) for a longer history of the importance of fisheries for rural Bangladeshis. Many of the rural poor had access to various common pool resources (community ponds, tanks, seasonal beels, ditches and canals; 109).
13. Marx’s primitive accumulation describes how private owners take publicly owned land and enclose it, expelling existing claimants and later releasing these once public resources as private capital (Fairhead, Leach, and Scoones 2012). Marx refers to how the English state enclosed common natural resources (“the commons”) and forcibly deprived English peasants of directly accessing a means of production. He argues that this was a point of departure for a capitalist mode of production, hence the term “primitive” (original, or urspünglich) accumulation (Marx 1976, 873–95, cited in Hall 2012).
14. Harvey’s ABD extends Marx’s primitive accumulation by incorporating global capitalist financial processes after 1973 and sees it as an economic process of overaccumulated capital finding new outlets, where appropriated land and nature is converted into financial investments and speculation (Hall 2013, 1593–95).
15. Harvey’s concept of ABD presumes that the expropriated resources are initially owned or held by the dispossessed groups (Adnan 2013; Lerche 2011). However, empirical studies in Southeast Asia (Hall 2012; Schober 2016) and South Asia (Adnan 2016; Ahasan and Gardner 2016; Gardner and Gerharz 2016) highlight the complexity of rural property relations, where the transfer of land from one group of users to another is often incremental, politicized and shifting over time. For example, Nielsen (2010) highlights the near consensus of a wide variety of actors and interests in West Bengal supporting land acquisition for a Tata car manufacturing factory in the name of “social development” and local jobs.
16. See Pokrant 2014; M. S. Hossain, Uddin, and Fakhruddin 2013; A. Ali 2006; Shahid and Islam 2003; Deb 1998; Hill 2008, 179; A. Rahman 1994, 23) for details on the agroecological and biodiversity consequences of brackish aquaculture.
17. Paprocki and Cons (2014b, 16–17) suggest that Polder 22’s relative independence from industrial agriculture has facilitated the survival of peasant agriculture. However, they also note how most landless people are unable to recover costs from sharecropping in rice cultivation because of the expenses of buying seeds and “other inputs” (15–16). Indeed, high-yield rice seeds and agrochemicals are capital intensive products that are integral to the global industrial food regime (chap. 4). Freedom from bagda does increase local food supplies, but may not necessarily result in freedom from neoliberal food regimes.
18. According to Noshima, single women often collect kurte instead of buying rice to save money, but in Lonanodi the gher owners forbid them from entering the fields, instead selling the kurte to businesses.
19. See also Pokrant (2014) and Veuthey and Gerber (2012, 614).
20. In contrast to Jalais’s (2010a) suggestion that prawn-fry collection empowers women in the Indian Sundarbans both economically and socially, enabling them to challenge existing patriarchal norms, women from landless households (like Noshima) struggle the most because of the tiger prawn’s negative impact on food availability and employment opportunities (Guhathakurta 2003). This illustrates the different scenarios in the more saline islands of the West Bengal Sundarbans when compared with Nodi, where agriculture is possible.
21. Noshima catches shrimp fry with current jal: a synthetic blue fishing net prohibited by law. She sells these wild fry (less prone to disease and whitespot virus) to hatcheries and gher owners. When I asked about bycatch, she replied that they cannot sort out all the different fry next to the river and take the bucket home where they save the bagda and golda fry, then throw away the rest. “We cannot spend an hour to go back and forth to the river to return the other fry.”
22. Wild fisheries are also under threat from overfishing by commercial trawlers. The number of fish and fish species have been further reduced by embankments, the siltation of canals, dams, flood control, and pollution (Van Schendel 2009).
23. I discuss how bhejal is tied to the commoditization of food for profit in chap. 4.
24. “The abundance of fish afford a supply almost attainable to every class, and in the Ganges and its innumerable branches are of many different kinds. Their plenty at some seasons is so great that they become the ordinary food of the poorest natives, who are said to contract disease from too liberally indulging themselves” (Hamilton 1815, 122).
25. From 2006 through 2008, an interim caretaker government was responsible for managing Bangladesh’s state affairs until parliamentary elections were held. See Lewis (2011) for further details.
26. Local Bangladeshi NGOs actively supported grassroots movements that opposed tiger-prawn cultivation and its associated human rights abuses. In January 2012, the High Court of Bangladesh ruled that salinity intrusion and the expansion of saline tiger-prawn cultivation water infrastructure were illegal.
Chapter Four
1. Cullather’s historiography traces the role of the “calorie” and the various historical developments forming the spread of the modernizing Green Revolution across the Global South to counter a red communist revolution.
2. The colonial reform agenda focused on intensifying cultivation rather than changing technologies. Hunter (1875) highlights the use of local agricultural tools and the importance of cow dung as a supplement to the fertile silt deposited during the monsoon season.
3. Yields were around twenty maunds per acre, 6.67 maunds per bigha, with no cost for seeds or livestock manure (Lahiri 1936, 37). Compare this with the yield of around fifteen to twenty maunds per bigha of HYV BR-23 with agrochemicals in Nodi today.
4. Despite droughts and famine, Viceroy Bulwer-Lytton insisted that nothing should prevent the export of rice and wheat to England. Even as millions died, he concentrated on preparing for Queen Victoria’s investiture as empress of India. The highlight of the celebrations was a week-long feast for 68,000 dignitaries (Davis 2007, 26–28).
5. Cullather’s book provides a deeper understanding of the global geopolitics of the Green Revolution, especially the key actors and institutions. IRRI and its sister organizations became part of the CGIAR system (Consortium of International Agricultural Research Centers). The latter was founded in 1971, and included OECD members, the Asian Development Bank, World Bank, Inter-American Development Bank, International Development Research Centre, Ford Foundation, Kellogg Foundation, Rockefeller Foundation, the FAO, and UNDP (CGIAR 2016).
6. In Nodi, there was minimal boro rice cultivation, thus few farmers who grew water-intensive crops during the dry season. For more details on the negative environmental effects of groundwater irrigation, see Sultana and Thompson (1997); Rasul and Chowdhury (2010); Hill (2008); Whitcombe (1995); Khan (2003); Swain (1996); and FAO (2011, 151–62).
7. Millions of tube wells have never been tested for arsenic contamination (A. H. Smith, Lingas, and Rahman 2000), which is present both in drinking water and tube well irrigated crops (Chandrasekharam 2004; Swain 1996). Some 85 million people in Bangladesh are at high risk of developing deadly arsenicosis symptoms (M. S. Islam 2016), while consumption of water with high levels of arsenic can result in lung, bladder, and skin cancers (A. H. Smith, Lingas, and Rahman 2000).
8. For more information see Alauddin and Tisdell (1991, 263); Zaman (2000); Miah (2000); Naseem (2000); Mulvaney, Khan, and Ellsworth (2009).
9. Fupu once owned several hectares of land that she inherited from her father. I was surprised as her family now has no property other than their homesteads, located next to Hassan’s home. Fupu, along with many others, lost land with little compensation in the 1970s, around the time of the war of independence. Old and without income or property, Fupu was no longer seen as useful and received little support from her sons. Fupu passed away in December 2019, and I am deeply indebted for the time, wisdom, and care she shared with me throughout my fieldwork.
10. BR-23 is a high-yielding variety that arose out of two early deep-water rice varieties in the mid-1980s: BR4 (Sheshu, Malabanan, and Mallik 1988) and DA29 (Bangura and Goita 1988). It is one of the few varieties that is tall enough to withstand the salinity and relative high floods in the embanked and low-lying southwest coastal zone (BRRI 2020).
11. Growing more than thirty varieties entails greater diversification of risk amid today’s varying and unpredictable weather changes. Thus, promoting several different types of desi varieties could actually help Bangladesh prepare for future climatic risks.
12. Recent research published in New Scientist reveals how modern agriculture is increasingly cultivating less-bitter varieties to accommodate the palates of consumers, while, in fact, this very bitterness indicates a richness in the chemical phytonutrients that help the body function properly and help prevent disease by including antioxidant, anti-inflammatory, and liver-health properties (Zaraska 2015).
13. Mainly based on informants from the DAE, BRRI, IRRI, BARC, and FAO.
14. He further explained: “A plant requires seventeen different nutrients. Fourteen of these are micronutrients: calcium, sulfur, magnesium, zinc, manganese, copper, iron, boron, molybdenum, chlorine, nickel, sodium, cobalt, and aluminum. Three of these are macronutrients: nitrogen—what we call urea—phosphorus (TSP), and potassium (potash, MOP).”
15. In Hinduism, shakti is the primordial cosmic energy that gives birth to the universe, and is also worshipped as the mother goddess (Lowitz and Datta 2004, 111).
16. The ethnosociology of India allowed a space for local knowledge systems to be evaluated in their own terms versus prevailing ethnocentrist and orientalist approaches to India (Marriott 1991; Dirks 1989), but it is criticized for being ahistorical, apolitical, and essentialist as it studied rural society as a microcosm of the Hindu universe (Vasavi 1999). See also Moffat (1990).
17. He added: “But to be honest with you, it is not good that we cultivate a second crop with irrigation. It is better that the land lies fallow so the soil can recover, and we can rear cows again. These development projects should stop the cultivation of a second crop and promote desi rice varieties and help people to rear cows. But it is a problem now, we are too many people.”
18. Toxic residuals occur when pesticide is applied and sold without regard for the maturation time prescribed. The extensive problem of pesticide residues and how frequently they are above maximum residue limit has been the focus of several studies analyzing vegetables including (M. W. Islam et al. 2014; Barański et al. 2014; M. A. Islam, Islam, and Hossain 2015; A. Z. Chowdhury et al. 2014; M. A. Z. Chowdhury et al. 2014; Taylor et al. 2003). Furthermore, reports of similar problem appear prevalent in India (Times of India 2015)
19. Even those with relative wealth living in urban areas had a hard time avoiding bhejal foods unless they had access to rural lands where they could hire someone to grow food without chemicals, thus evading market intermediaries.
20. Already in the early 1990s, scholars and activists warned that the use of agrochemicals can reduce species diversity, upset the ecological balance, and stimulate the development of pest populations by killing nontarget populations beneficial to human beings. They also warned that fisheries are affected and that residual pesticides may cause human health problems (Alauddin and Tisdell 1991, 275; Shiva 1991).
21. The main means for landless people to acquire rice is either to grow the rice on leased land (bandhok), by sharecropping (bhag), to work as a wage laborer to obtain rice as a payment in kind, or to buy it.
22. For ethnographic details on the illegal kidney and liver lobe trade, see Moniruzzaman (2012; 2019).
Chapter Five
1. Because of the low wages of public healthcare professionals, many doctors have a “chamber” at the public institution where they are employed where patients come for private consultations after working hours.
2. Sheikh Mujibur Rahman’s administration was accused of corruption and poor decision making. He did not heed the advice of the prime minister, Tajuddin Ahmed, and created a one-party system as well as a paramilitary unit called the Rakkhi Bahini, which the public perceived to be brutal and which engaged in torture and rape (Karim 2011; Lewis 2011).
3. This entailed import liberalization, quota restrictions lowered from 42 percent of imports to only 2 percent of imports by 1996; the creation of export-processing zones and duty-free subsidies; a ten-year tax exemption and exemption from income tax on interest for foreigners; duty-free import of machinery, raw materials, and construction materials; and duty-free export of foods produced in the zones (Tait 2003).
4. While “good governance’ originated among African scholars in relation to making state-society relations developmental, democratic, and socially inclusive, the term was taken up by international institutions, including the World Bank, as a new label for aid conditionality. Good governance became a way to suggest that bad governance, or corruption, was why SAPs failed (Mkandawire 2007, 679). This view of the state assumes that markets would be able to succeed where states failed because of corruption, and that anticorruption reform of market-enabling institutions would reduce transaction costs and increase market efficiency. However, critics argue that this anticorruption focus in practice meant reducing the state’s capacity to intervene in general (M. Khan 2004) and contributed to pervasive state failure, paradoxically creating a vacuum and producing an environment within which widespread corruption could flourish (Onis and Senses 2005).
5. The precarious situation faced by Lakshmi and Karuli gives credence to Chant and Sweetman’s (2012) argument that women, individually and collectively, acted as buffers to the fall out of SAPs: rising male under-or unemployment, falling purchasing power, and scaled-down public-sector service provisions. Under SAPs, women were expected to substitute for the failure of state institutions to provide health, education, and other services for their citizens (Elson 1995) and to make ends meet in an era of high and increasing unemployment (Chant and Sweetman 2012).
6. Similar dynamics are also happening outside of South Asia, as illustrated by Mains’s (2007) ethnography of young men in Ethiopia and Honwana’s (2012) case study on the lived experience of failed neoliberal economic policies among young men in Mozambique, Senegal, South Africa, and Tunisia.
7. Hindu interlocutors suggest that their marriages rarely resulted in divorce, unlike their Muslim neighbors.
8. This social shift has been taking place for several decades. Alauddin and Tisdell’s (1991, 161) analyze the greater penetration of capitalist market forces in rural Bangladesh and state “the traditional ‘sharing ethics’ at the local and community levels may have been or are gradually being replaced by egocentric considerations characteristic of more individualistic societies.”
9. A tally of my survey suggests that half of the sons are taking care of at least one elderly parent.
Conclusion
1 Cyclone Amphan hit the Satkhira District the hardest. Weak embankments in many tiger-prawn producing areas broke completely at the height of the saline dry season—for agricultural areas the saline incursion was particularly devastating. Khulna and Nodi were thankfully spared as the Sundarbans mangrove forest greatly reduced the impact. While migration in the wake of this natural disaster could be portrayed as “climate-induced,” it also points to the importance of embankments in protecting land from dry season saline incursion and cyclonic events. Yet 150 kilometers of embankments were broken at eighty-four points in thirteen districts (IFRC 2020), illustrating how embankments, whether because of storms or regular river erosion, require constant, institutionalized maintenance and repair. Migration in this area is complex and multifaceted (Dewan, in review) and was further affected by Covid-19 lockdown policies nationally and abroad.