RIPPLING SEA WAVES, dried riverbeds, endless fields—it’s a picture of in-your-face paradox. There is water everywhere here, but not much to drink. In 17 subdistricts of southwestern Bangladesh, normal water usage has been subverted by heavyhanded ‘development’. There is no longer much freshwater, only undrinkable brine. Shrimp farming has weakened the very foundation of coastal agriculture. Birds, fishes, insects, symbionts in the intertidal web of life—they’ve all been done in by brackish water.
In the 1980s, water along the coast was sealed off in supralittoral ponds for commercial shrimp farming. In 1994, a government order, passed without discussion, declared the entire coast open for shrimp farming. This brute-force displacement of coastal agriculture by commercial farming not only did away with agricultural communities’ basic right to work, it also cost them their rights to water, marshes, forests and land. Virtually overnight, work that for centuries had been guaranteed for a multigenerational multitude was now held by a handful of people employed in shrimp farms.
The supercyclones Sidr (2007) and Aila (2009) devastated the entire southern region, turning it into a salty, barren landscape. Today, there is no food, nowhere to source it from and no government permission for people to forage in forests and rivers. The Sundarbans, the world’s largest mangrove forest, can no longer provide sustenance for everyone who needs it. Consequently, social relations between impoverished forest dwellers and uprooted farmers are volatile. Heading for extinction are the centuries-old vocations of honey extraction, woodcutting, limestone-making and clearing jungles. The ubiquity of saltwater is chasing everyone into new and possibly hazardous livelihoods. Hungry and out of work, villagers are moving to urban centres, territory unfamiliar to them.
As long as the Bangladesh government fails to understand the importance of freshwater conservation and microcommercial coastal farming, and the dangers of distressed coastal-interior migration, there is little hope of stopping the rampage of brine.