ABOUT seven years ago, Gaur Mondol noticed he couldn’t grow as much rice on his land as salty water seeped in from the Passur River, which stretches from his home in Bangladesh’s interior all the way to the Indian Ocean.
Now the rice paddies are completely inundated, leaving the land barren. To find work, he must walk for miles each day to other villages. His annual income has fallen by half to 36,000 taka ($569). He makes about $5 a day if he’s lucky, and most of that goes to buy food for his family of four.
“I’m always worried that my house will be washed away someday,” Mondol said from his home in Mongla sub-district, pointing to a riverside tamarind tree with water swirling around its exposed roots. “My family is constantly under threat as the river creeps in.”
Rising sea levels are one of the biggest threats to the $185 billion economy over the next half a century, with farmers like Mondol already facing the consequences. Bangladesh, which needs to grow at 8 per cent pace to pull people out of poverty, stands to lose about 2 per cent of gross domestic product each year by 2050, according to the Asian Development Bank.
“The sea-level rise and extreme climate events are the two ways that salinity intrudes into the freshwater system,” Mahfuzuddin Ahmed, an adviser in the ADB’s regional and sustainable development department, said by phone from Manila. “The implication for food security is quite big.”
Bangladesh is one of the world’s most densely populated countries, with half the US population crammed into an area the size of New York state. About 50 per cent of its citizens are directly dependent on agriculture for their livelihoods, a quarter live in the coastal zone, and 21 per cent of these lands are affected by an excess of salinity.
The proportion of arable land has fallen 7.3 per cent between 2000-2010, faster than South Asia’s 2 per cent decline, with geography playing a large role.
Bangladesh is nestled at a point where tidal waves from the Indian Ocean flow into the Bay of Bengal. While these create the Sundarbans mangroves, home to the endangered Bengal tiger, winds and currents cause saline water to mix with upstream rivers.
