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Small farmers and agri heritage
Saifur Rashid
FOR generations, life in rural Bangladesh has moved to the rhythm of paddy field: the transplanting of aman with the arrival of the monsoon, the golden harvest of boro and the shared celebration of nabanna. Rice was never merely a crop; it was livelihood, culture and identity folded into one. But a new government survey suggests that rhythm is breaking quietly, inside millions of homesteads.
A recent report by the Bangladesh Bureau of Statistics states that small farmers, who make up 53.65 per cent of the country’s food producers now earn only a marginal share of their income from the land itself. On average, they take home just Tk 4,591 a year from staple seasonal crops such as aman and boro rice, wheat and vegetables, and a mere Tk 2,331 from orchard crops like mango, jackfruit and tea. Livestock and poultry, by contrast, now account for roughly 85 per cent of a small farmer’s net income, generating an average of Tk 28,421 a year.
These figures signify more than a transformation in agricultural economics; they indicate a gradual departure from the crop-centred identity that has characterised Bangladeshi agriculture for centuries, and, in a larger sense, the slow diminishment of a living cultural heritage.
The structural roots of the shift
THE reasons are structural, not a failure of will on the farmers’ part. High costs for seed, fertiliser, irrigation and pesticides, combined with sharecropping and leased-land arrangements, leave little profit once a crop is harvested. Livestock, on the other hand, requires small capital, can be managed from the homestead and needs no hired labour making it a far more attractive option than the shrinking returns of cultivation.
Adding to these pressures is a sharp inequality between small and large farmers. The BBS data show small farmers earning just Tk 33,639 a year on average, nearly four times less than large-scale farmers who earn Tk 1,29,956, and about a tenth of the national per capita income. Access to state support follows the same skewed pattern: a World Bank study cited in the report found that the richest 20 per cent of landholders receive roughly half of all fertiliser subsidies, while the bottom 40 per cent of small farmers receive only 15 per cent.
Meanwhile, the favourable policy conditions that might have protected these farmers are weakening. Agriculture’s share of the national budget has fallen from 10.65 per cent in FY2011–12 to a proposed 4.99 per cent in FY2026–27, with implementation of development projects slowing from over 90 per cent to around 60 per cent in recent years. Unpredictable weather, natural disasters, shrinking farmland and weak market and post-harvest infrastructure complete the picture of a smallholder economy under sustained strain.
Heritage in the hands of the farmer
IT WOULD be easy to read these figures purely as agricultural statistics. But viewed through the lens of living heritage, they describe something larger: the disappearance of a knowledge system.
Bangladesh’s agricultural heritage does not live in archives or gene banks, it lives in the hands of farmers who know which rice variety suits a particular soil, when to transplant by the seasonal calendar, how to save seed, how to manage water. Every time a small farmer abandons the field for the barn, that transmission of knowledge is interrupted. As one analysis of the BBS findings puts it, the loss is not simply of agricultural labour but of a knowledge system built over generations.
The anthropologist Robert Netting argued that smallholder farming, far from being an inefficient relic awaiting replacement by industrial agriculture, represents intensive, place-specific knowledge accumulated through an intimate relationship with a particular plot of land, water system and community. Human ecologist David Cleveland’s work adds that crop biodiversity cannot be separated from the farmers who maintain it, that the indigenous seed varieties and the knowledge of selecting, planting and cooking them, vanish together once a variety falls out of active cultivation. The loss of indigenous rice varieties, traditional cropping patterns and locally adapted farming techniques is not simply a loss of biological resources. It is also a loss of ‘cultural memory’ and ‘farmer-generated innovation.’
Bangladesh has already seen this narrowing: numerous indigenous rice varieties have disappeared from the fields, replaced by a small number of commercial varieties. Practices such as floating agriculture, a centuries-old adaptation to waterlogging in the south, and officially recognised by the FAO as a Globally Important Agricultural Heritage System, survive only as long as farmers keep practising them.
Safeguarding a heritage still in motion
IF SMALL farmers continue drifting from crop to livestock farming purely out of economic necessity, the consequences will extend well beyond household income. Seeds, seasonal practices, culinary traditions, rituals and songs tied to the rice-growing calendar risk becoming symbolic performances rather than living practices connected to actual agricultural life. Festivals like nabanna, rooted in the rice harvest, would lose the very activity that gives them meaning.
The report’s findings point towards a set of remedies that treat farmers not merely as producers to be subsidised, but as custodians of a heritage to be safeguarded: formal recognition of traditional agricultural knowledge, community seed banks that keep seeds in active cultivation and exchange, geographical indication and heritage branding for traditional varieties, genuine dialogue between farmer knowledge and scientific extension services, and most fundamentally secure land tenure, fair prices, affordable credit and protection from exploitative intermediaries.
The BBS data clearly points to a conclusion that cultural heritage is inseparable from the livelihoods of those who sustain it. Preserving the living agricultural heritage of Bangladesh does not require resisting change, but it does require ensuring economic viability for the farmers who carry those traditions forward. BBS figures indicate that this viability is increasingly absent for a large segment of small farmers, resulting in a gradual but measurable shift away from crop cultivation towards livestock rearing.
Dr Saifur Rashid is professor of anthropology at the University of Dhaka.
Saifur Rashid
FOR generations, life in rural Bangladesh has moved to the rhythm of paddy field: the transplanting of aman with the arrival of the monsoon, the golden harvest of boro and the shared celebration of nabanna. Rice was never merely a crop; it was livelihood, culture and identity folded into one. But a new government survey suggests that rhythm is breaking quietly, inside millions of homesteads.
A recent report by the Bangladesh Bureau of Statistics states that small farmers, who make up 53.65 per cent of the country’s food producers now earn only a marginal share of their income from the land itself. On average, they take home just Tk 4,591 a year from staple seasonal crops such as aman and boro rice, wheat and vegetables, and a mere Tk 2,331 from orchard crops like mango, jackfruit and tea. Livestock and poultry, by contrast, now account for roughly 85 per cent of a small farmer’s net income, generating an average of Tk 28,421 a year.
These figures signify more than a transformation in agricultural economics; they indicate a gradual departure from the crop-centred identity that has characterised Bangladeshi agriculture for centuries, and, in a larger sense, the slow diminishment of a living cultural heritage.
The structural roots of the shift
THE reasons are structural, not a failure of will on the farmers’ part. High costs for seed, fertiliser, irrigation and pesticides, combined with sharecropping and leased-land arrangements, leave little profit once a crop is harvested. Livestock, on the other hand, requires small capital, can be managed from the homestead and needs no hired labour making it a far more attractive option than the shrinking returns of cultivation.
Adding to these pressures is a sharp inequality between small and large farmers. The BBS data show small farmers earning just Tk 33,639 a year on average, nearly four times less than large-scale farmers who earn Tk 1,29,956, and about a tenth of the national per capita income. Access to state support follows the same skewed pattern: a World Bank study cited in the report found that the richest 20 per cent of landholders receive roughly half of all fertiliser subsidies, while the bottom 40 per cent of small farmers receive only 15 per cent.
Meanwhile, the favourable policy conditions that might have protected these farmers are weakening. Agriculture’s share of the national budget has fallen from 10.65 per cent in FY2011–12 to a proposed 4.99 per cent in FY2026–27, with implementation of development projects slowing from over 90 per cent to around 60 per cent in recent years. Unpredictable weather, natural disasters, shrinking farmland and weak market and post-harvest infrastructure complete the picture of a smallholder economy under sustained strain.
Heritage in the hands of the farmer
IT WOULD be easy to read these figures purely as agricultural statistics. But viewed through the lens of living heritage, they describe something larger: the disappearance of a knowledge system.
Bangladesh’s agricultural heritage does not live in archives or gene banks, it lives in the hands of farmers who know which rice variety suits a particular soil, when to transplant by the seasonal calendar, how to save seed, how to manage water. Every time a small farmer abandons the field for the barn, that transmission of knowledge is interrupted. As one analysis of the BBS findings puts it, the loss is not simply of agricultural labour but of a knowledge system built over generations.
The anthropologist Robert Netting argued that smallholder farming, far from being an inefficient relic awaiting replacement by industrial agriculture, represents intensive, place-specific knowledge accumulated through an intimate relationship with a particular plot of land, water system and community. Human ecologist David Cleveland’s work adds that crop biodiversity cannot be separated from the farmers who maintain it, that the indigenous seed varieties and the knowledge of selecting, planting and cooking them, vanish together once a variety falls out of active cultivation. The loss of indigenous rice varieties, traditional cropping patterns and locally adapted farming techniques is not simply a loss of biological resources. It is also a loss of ‘cultural memory’ and ‘farmer-generated innovation.’
Bangladesh has already seen this narrowing: numerous indigenous rice varieties have disappeared from the fields, replaced by a small number of commercial varieties. Practices such as floating agriculture, a centuries-old adaptation to waterlogging in the south, and officially recognised by the FAO as a Globally Important Agricultural Heritage System, survive only as long as farmers keep practising them.
Safeguarding a heritage still in motion
IF SMALL farmers continue drifting from crop to livestock farming purely out of economic necessity, the consequences will extend well beyond household income. Seeds, seasonal practices, culinary traditions, rituals and songs tied to the rice-growing calendar risk becoming symbolic performances rather than living practices connected to actual agricultural life. Festivals like nabanna, rooted in the rice harvest, would lose the very activity that gives them meaning.
The report’s findings point towards a set of remedies that treat farmers not merely as producers to be subsidised, but as custodians of a heritage to be safeguarded: formal recognition of traditional agricultural knowledge, community seed banks that keep seeds in active cultivation and exchange, geographical indication and heritage branding for traditional varieties, genuine dialogue between farmer knowledge and scientific extension services, and most fundamentally secure land tenure, fair prices, affordable credit and protection from exploitative intermediaries.
The BBS data clearly points to a conclusion that cultural heritage is inseparable from the livelihoods of those who sustain it. Preserving the living agricultural heritage of Bangladesh does not require resisting change, but it does require ensuring economic viability for the farmers who carry those traditions forward. BBS figures indicate that this viability is increasingly absent for a large segment of small farmers, resulting in a gradual but measurable shift away from crop cultivation towards livestock rearing.
Dr Saifur Rashid is professor of anthropology at the University of Dhaka.
