
Low-tech solutions have brought thousands of acres of farmland back into production.
It’s nearly 100 degrees Fahrenheit and only midmorning at Reshma Begum’s tiny farmstead in southwestern Bangladesh. Humidity is in the mid-80 percent range, making the clammy air cling to the skin like plaster. Too hot to be indoors, a small group of farmers is sitting under a shade tree watching a woman in a yellow safety vest, armed with a small bowl and bottle of distilled water. She’s testing soil samples that the farmers have brought for high levels of salinity, a problem that kills crops and has plagued coastal Bangladesh for decades, seriously impacting the country’s food security. The salinity readings help the farmers figure out what kinds of salt-tolerant crops will grow on their land.
Soil salinization forces Bangladesh’s smallholder farmers to fallow more than 2 billion acres of land every year during the dry season when freshwater sources in this intertidal zone dwindle, resulting in elevated soil salt levels. But these nine farmers, six women and three men, have been trained in saline agriculture techniques that enable them to successfully grow fruit and vegetable crops through peak salinity at the end of the dry season; something Begum couldn’t imagine five years ago when her land was so salty that nothing would grow.
Their training is part of a multipronged public-private partnership initiated in 2016 between several Ministry of Agriculture research institutes, Dutch and Australian governments, and national and international nonprofits intended to develop Bangladesh’s self-sufficiency in arable food production. The collaboration has yielded a simple, replicable, low-tech method that has so far trained more than 30,000 farmers in this region, brought thousands of acres of land back into production, and boosted incomes for some of Bangladesh’s poorest citizens.
The fact that women outnumber men two-to-one at Begum’s farmstead this morning is no accident. The project NGOs responsible for social outreach and training recruitment, Cordaid and Shushilan, have a mandate to empower some of the country’s most invisible women. Arun Ganguly, program manager at Cordaid, says the organization has focused on ensuring that more than 50 percent of its participants are women, so “they can feed their children and let women [be] recognize[d] as farmers, which was not accepted before” in Bangladesh’s male-dominant culture. The plan is informed by years of research that’s shown when a rural Bangladeshi woman is included in agriculture and attendant decision making, crop diversity increases, her family’s average calorie intake rises, and the household diet becomes more varied. Crucially, these positive outcomes are stronger for low-income smallholders.
It’s also designed to encourage professional ambition. Through Cordaid’s program, Reshma Begum has become what’s known as a lead farmer, a peer mentor who trains other women in her area. The group that’s shown up to have their farm soils tested are all lead farmers now. This “train the trainers” model, implemented by The Salt Doctors, a Dutch company previously involved in the project, has allowed the NGOs to teach thousands of farmers advanced salt-tolerant growing techniques. In turn, lead farmers set up their own teaching groups, comprising mostly women, to share the knowledge.
When Begum became a lead farmer about four years ago, “all of our group farmers follow[ed] me,” she says. “I feel good, and day by day I am making a profitable harvest.”



Some go even further and become farm business advisers (FBAs) like Sudebika Sorder, the woman testing soil samples in the shade. Before the FBAs came along, soil testing was out of reach for most rural farmers who couldn’t usually afford to travel to a regional agriculture lab and pay high fees for the analysis. Sorder visits farms, charges a small, affordable fee, and also gets a commission from a local seed company when farmers buy its salt-tolerant seeds through her. Once she has a basic salinity reading using an inexpensive meter Cordaid taught her to use, she consults a brightly-colored chart that lists various vegetables and their levels of salt tolerance and recommends crops that will be compatible with the soil of a specific farm.
Salt levels in soil and groundwater in Bangladesh — where the Ganges, Brahmaputra, and Meghna, three major rivers that form the economic and cultural backbone of South Asia flow into the sea — are influenced by several factors, including geology, engineering policies, and social practices. As an estuarine country, saltwater pushing upstream from the Bay of Bengal saturates soils during high tides and storm surges and infiltrates the shallow water table. Over the past century, dams built farther upstream, including in neighboring China and India, have decreased freshwater flows that used to counterbalance seawater intrusion. The expansion of shrimp farming in the 1980s encouraged thousands of farmers to flood their freshwater rice paddies with saltwater for shrimp ponds. Now climate change, which is increasing the frequency and intensity of droughts, extreme heat, storm surges, and sea level rise, is exacerbating the problem.
The international project is tackling these multiple factors by encouraging a shift in both technology use and longstanding farming practices in Bangladesh.
On the science end, the Netherlands and Australia have transferred seed technology, expertise, and funding to Ministry of Agriculture research institutes. These research institutions have, in turn, worked with Bangladeshi seed company Lal Teer so the country can move away from its reliance on imported salt-tolerant seeds and shore up domestic supply. Cordaid’s training program gives these seeds to farmers for free for their first planting season.
The rest of the program promotes simple, low- or no-cost changes in behavior and practice to ensure those seeds take root. Begum, for instance, has learned to prepare her seed beds with adequate drainage, use rice straw mulch to slow evaporation, not to till her fields, and install straightforward, inexpensive drip irrigation systems using clay pots with a few holes in the bottom. She also learned to make small calendar changes in planting seasons. For example, sowing seeds even one month earlier than when the dry season begins (when they would normally drain their rice beds and plant their next batch of mostly-vegetable crops) can make the difference in whether a vegetable crop survives. Switching varieties of rice, the lifeblood of Bangladesh, from a long-duration variety that takes 160 to 200 days to mature, to a high-yield, short-duration variety that can be harvested in about 110 to 130 days, has also helped since it means the land can be planted with a third round of vegetable crops sooner.
Begum and her neighbors have seen the difference. Her group now successfully grows high-value, salt-tolerant crops for market, such as watermelon, sunflower, okra and spinach after their rice is harvested.
The program is not without challenges, however. For instance, salt tolerant does not mean drought resistant, and some of Begum’s crops failed this year because of drought accompanied by the most extreme heat the country has seen in years. Her stored rainwater simply wasn’t enough to keep her plants alive, and the irrigation water was too salty even for some of her tolerant crops.
“In the saline area from January to April-May, the river water salinity is very high,” says Priya Lal Chandra Paul, an engineer with the Department of Irrigation and Water Management at Bangladesh Rice Research Institute (BRRI). “Farmers can’t use this water.”
The result is that by the end of the dry season, the water can be even saltier than seawater. The critical problem is that these rivers are connected to irrigation canals that lace southwestern Bangladesh, delivering saline water directly to smallholders’ land. So, Paul explains, the institute is teaching locals who control the sluice gates of these canals another simple shift: Open and close the gates a little earlier in the rainy season to store more freshwater.
I spoke with 16 farmers in this region, and all had the same complaint.
“Water is the number one issue that needs to be solved,” says Mukta Gazi, a 25-year-old farmer who’s been working the land all her life. “So re-excavating this river and canal and storing some freshwater during the rainy season will solve many problems of this area.”
Still, Gazi, who received training in saline agriculture through BRRI and the Bangladesh Agriculture Research Institute (BARI), says, in general, things have improved here.
“In the past, there was only rice. Only transplanted Aman rice [a wet-season rice variety that accounts for 40 percent of Bangladesh’s rice production]. And when I got introduced with BARI and BRRI and got some training and information from them, I used [it] to grow zero-tillage potato, zero-tillage garlic, sunflower, and salt-tolerant rice varieties as well.”
And all of this crop diversification is leading to crop intensification. Citing land use and land cover imaging analysis, Paul says that since 2016, when the first efforts began, cropping intensity increased by 270 percent in southwestern Bangladesh. “So day by day, because we have the technology, we have the salt-tolerant varieties, farmers can grow lots of crops, even they have salinity problem, climate problem, water problem, but still the crop cultivation is increasing,” he says. This, he adds, is good for food security.
The relative success of the project offers lessons and insights for other regions around the world that are facing similar problems. Soil salinization is devastating vast stretches of farmland from the United States to Uzbekistan to nations across Africa.
According to the UN Food and Agriculture Organization, salt-affected soils remove up to 1.5 million hectares of farmland a year from production and “decreases the production potential” of 46 million more hectares annually. Experts estimate a range of the annual cost of this loss from tens of millions to tens of billions of dollars. Implementing similar projects could help improve the economy and food security in these regions as well.
For Begum and her group of lead farmers, the measure of the project’s success is different, but equally important. They have been able to form collectives to sell their high-value crops as one unit at markets and to wholesalers and leverage their value, eliminating undercutting by middlemen. Some women have used their increased earnings to buy more cows and reinvest in their land, others to bring their husbands home from day-laboring in the cities because they can farm year round now. And it is enabling many, such as Gazi, to invest in the future.
“[With the project’s support,] I have been able to improve my family’s status. I can educate my child. I can spend money for better living,” she says. “This I want.”