Straight Talk
Autumn harvest
23 October 2008, 18:00 PM
Dr. Mazid and the farmers talk it over. Photo: Amirul Rajiv
One of the occupational hazards of being an assistant editor is that you don't get out from behind your desk to go out into the field nearly as much as you should. So when the chairman of Research Initiatives Bangladesh, Dr. Shamsul Bari, invited me and Daily Star photographer Amirul Rajiv to come with him to Nilphamari to see first hand how the people from northern Bangladesh are working to make monga a thing of the past, we didn't need to be asked twice.
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RIB is an interesting organisation. It is determinedly not an NGO, and describes itself as a research support agency involved in participatory action research.
The research it does is called gonogobeshona (people's research) and is driven by the preferences and the decisions of the communities in which the research is carried out, not those of the researchers. The projects that it involves itself with are collaborative action projects conceived of to help support the research.
The focus is on full participation and ownership of the involved communities, with RIB only facilitating, and with the locals determining for themselves what research they wish to be involved in and what programs they wish to pursue in support of the research.
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We start the day with a visit to a couple of the RIB-facilitated primary schools, two of the 150-odd schools that RIB has helped local communities to set up to support action research projects on the educational needs of children in the country's poorest communities.
The philosophy behind the program is simple. RIB provides the teaching material and whatever guidance the locals ask for, but the locals themselves must take the initiative to set up the school, make all the relevant organizational decisions and arrangements themselves, and fund everything from the school building to the teacher salaries from their own pockets.
The idea is that each community can thus can take control of its children's educational destinies and not have to depend on either government or NGO support which can be taken away at any time.
The parents we meet all seem happy with the schools. They give all the right answers as to the value of self-reliance and their ownership of their children's education without recourse to outside help. But I can't help suspecting that they know what the "right" answer is and that they might not refuse an offer of a tin roof or a school building if one were to come their way.
Still, the schools are astonishing. The teaching methodology is based on an elaborate and ingenious system of cards (developed by RIB), with which the children learn how to read and write and do basic sums. The idea is to make learning fun, and the children clearly enjoy themselves at school, often showing up for class hours ahead of time, with those who have graduated on to class one in local government schools doing very well (or so they proudly tell me!).
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The next program we look at is the lakkha (lacquer) cultivation and production program. The idea is to support the northern farming communities in the production of additional cash crops to help supplement their income from more traditional farming.
Lakkha is actually not a crop. It is derived from insects that infest and can be cultivated on boroi trees. The methodology is simplicity itself: the locals buy (and now produce their own and even sell), for Tk 3-5 each, insect-infested branches, which are then tethered to their boroi trees, allowing the whole tree to become infested.
Roughly 100 days later, the insects are scraped off the trees and ground up into a fine powder that is heated in small clay ovens in tiny one-room factories. The process produces a liquid that can be used to make dye/stain/polish and a clear, hard shellac that sells for anywhere from Tk 1,200-1,600 a kilo. All told, one can earn up to Tk 2,500 a tree each year, and the demand for the shellac and dye is more or less endless.
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After our brief tour of the lakkha factory (actually a small tin-roofed room), we drive to Laxmichap to talk to the local farmers about their experience cultivating BRRI-33 rice.
The paddy fields are gorgeous, an endless checkers-board of green on green, already harvested BRRI-33 fields, the few remaining fields of 4-foot high stalks that will be harvested in a day or two, and the smaller stalks of BRRI-11 and other local rice varieties that will be harvested in two months' time.
It is the month of Kartik, known in the North as "Mora Kartik" -- the monga season -- the season of hunger, the days of privation as the entire region waits, its food stocks dwindling, for the winter harvest.
There is not much else to do but agricultural work in this part of the country, and once the planting season is done, the farmers and their families have to settle in for a long wait before they can fill their bellies again at harvest time.
The magic of BRRI-33 is that it grows to maturity and can be harvested in 100 days, fully two months before typical varieties of rice that have been cultivated since time immemorial. Not only does this allow the farmers to harvest and cash in two months earlier than they otherwise would, thus completely avoiding the traditional two months of hunger, it also allows for a third harvest of winter vegetables, maize, wheat, potatoes, or moog dal, before the planting of the boro rice crop early in the next year.
The farmers are thrilled with BRRI-33. The yield is good, anywhere from 12 to 16 maunds per bigha, the price they receive for it is good, some Tk 600 a maund, due to the fact that stocks of rice are now dwindling in the days before the winter harvest. Their next project, they tell us, is the setting up of a BRRI-33 seed bank so that they won't have to buy the seeds in the future.
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This has all been made possible by the dedication of the world-class scientists at the Bangladesh Rice Research Institute. Not only has their ingenuity developed the 100-day BRRI-33, but the BRRI scientists and economists have worked closely with the local farmers to ensure that BRRI-33 is a workable solution to their needs.
It is an inspiring sight to see the BRRI team, led by the institute's chief scientist, Dr. M.A. Mazid, sit in a circle with the local farmers, listening to their feedback, together planning out what needs to be done next year to improve, replicate, and scale up the program, working together to ensure the success of this initiative.
This is the best of Bangladesh, no question about it, our farmers and rice scientists, working hand-in-hand to make hunger a thing of the past.
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As the sun sets, the mela to celebrate the transformation of Kartik in this region from a time of want to a time of plenty, picks up steam. There are literally thousands of people, come to enjoy themselves and to allow themselves to dream of a happier future.
In addition to the food-stalls that one typically sees at such melas, there are stalls explaining the initiatives that are being undertaken in the area, so one can see the ploughs and drum seeders that have been developed to facilitate the planting of BRRI-33, the wool rugs the sale of which that provide another source of income for farming families, the work of the polli totho kendro (village information centre), the bio-fuel and fertiliser that is being developed locally.
The mela will continue all night with singing and dancing and a drama put on by a troupe of local farmers. Sadly, we can't stay till the end: we have a train to catch back to Dhaka.
Zafar Sobhan is Assistant Editor, The Daily Star.
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