Model of a resilient village for sustainable agricultural development for food security and nutrition, including the role of livestock:
In Bangladesh to achieve “sustainable agricultural development for food security and nutrition, including the role of livestock”, resilience at village level is necessary incorporating the people and their resources, land and production practices, available input and product, inflow and outflow of cash capital, and their excess to external information, services and capitals. A village is the smallest administrative boundary at rural areas of Bangladesh. The peoples who live in the village directly or indirectly depends on agriculture for their livelihood. Usually five to several hundred farm family living together who belongs to the same ancestor, building their homes in a cluster across the village locally known as “Para” and thus a village is consisted of several “Paras”. The father-workable person in a family is the head of the family used to manage the outdoor activities including agricultural production practices while the mother used to manage the post-harvest activities including the livestock. Besides, the homestead areas that managed by mother for growing seasonal vegetables and raising poultry. The children and the older person are the main dependant of a farm family. The main resources of a farm family is their home and homestead area that used for growing vegetable and local fruit trees, post harvest operations as well as play ground for small children and the grazing area of domestic animal; a shared pond-water of that used for bathing, cleaning and cooking food, used for fresh water fish farming and sometime as a source of irrigation water to crop land nearby during dry period; and some piece of land used for crop cultivation. A farm family uses family labour together with hired labour in growing crops and sometime work at other farmer’s field as a hired labour that are the main sources of their income. They used to purchase inputs like seeds, fertilizer and pesticide from the nearby village market also sell their product over there. Most of them have no access to formal financial institutions, few of them have access to microcredit with higher interest rates, majority of them depend on informal cash from local lender with the highest interest rate and most of the time it become burden to them. Likewise, their access to the information is limited. They are vulnerable to various natural disaster that are aggravated by the climate change. The social capital at village level is high as they share each other in well and woe.
In this context, sustainable agricultural development at Bangladeshi village never be achieved considering the linear factor in general like provide inputs and obtain yield and improve the farm family food security. Rather we have to identify the complexity of food security and identifying the factors and should take appropriate measures. I would like to propose indicators based “sustainable agricultural development for food security and nutrition, including the role of livestock” applicable to a village level of Bangladesh as a pilot project. The key areas of intervention are: selection of a village, collecting current demographic, agricultural including livestock, socioeconomic and livelihood data, setting the current status at various rank from 1 to 10 at farm family level and the average at village level. Targeting the raising of key areas rank within a given time frame as an indicators of sustainable development by providing necessary support to adopt appropriate practices by the farm families.
Md. Kamrul Islam