Of ponds and plates – and much more

Today, Salma has five cows, forty chickens, and a host of ducks and pigeons, as well as two hectares of rice fields and a large kitchen garden. As she sits next to her healthy young daughter, she tells us that she owes all of this to just one thing: "It was fish."

Salma is an aquaculture farmer. And like many of her kind, she has discovered that a well-maintained pond can do much more than provide protein and high levels of essential micronutrients for the family meal. "I have earned a huge profit from aquaculture," she says. "At the beginning we were very poor, but now we are self-reliant and happy."

Kanika Makal, another young Bangladeshi woman who has taken up aquaculture, concurs. "My family income depends on shrimp aquaculture, she says."Our production has increased, and we can satisfy our families' nutritional needs. Now our children are going to school, while before we couldn't even pay for their education."

In fact, aquaculture can be a highly lucrative business. Fish reared in ponds across Bangladesh currently provide as much as 60 percent of its citizens' animal protein. And thanks to a new "bottom-of-the-pyramid" approach being supported by the UN's Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), these small-scale aquaculture farmers are learning to improve and manage their ponds according to global food safety standards, so that they can access both domestic and international markets.

"This bottom of the pyramid approach is about trying to get the small landowners to actually engage in this very profitable business," explains Mike Robson, FAO Representative, Bangladesh. "Now, for export obviously you need food safety standards. And so a lot of the work that we're doing with those groups is about trying to get them to the safety standards so that they can access the markets, and actually take advantage of this lucrative opportunity."

And no matter how far their fish can go with the new safety standards, rural women like Kanika and Salma have not lost sight of the benefits they bring to their own homes. "My daughter and I, and all of my other family members are all healthy," says Salma. "We eat more fish which is full of protein. And we have hen eggs and milk from my dairy cows, which is very safe – there is no contamination."

In a country whose rates of malnutrition are among the highest in the world, this is no small feat. And perhaps most importantly, it's one that can be replicated. As Salma notes, "we eat all this good food and seeing us, our neighbors are learning to do the same."