In a column for Prothom Alo on World Food Day, Pavel Partha writes that Bangladesh's food system is overwhelmingly centred on people alone, and is at the same time neoliberal and controlled by multinational trade. In his view this unequal and unjust system now urgently needs to change.
Citing the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), he notes that 645 million people in the world go hungry and 2.69 billion cannot afford a healthy diet. This year's theme is "Today's innovation, tomorrow's nutrition". As he reads it, the innovation lies in combining local knowledge with inclusive methods to give everyone diverse, safe and nutritious food.
The column argues that behind the story of "bumper harvests", Green Revolution projects have held farming and food hostage. Diversity has been lost and the environment and public health put at risk; development projects swallow farmland and young people leave agriculture. He sees no need for a new "gene revolution" either; trust in the country's soil, water, living resources and local knowledge is, to him, what will sustain it.
For rural people, he writes, food does not mean only human food. Chemical farming breaks up the world of earthworms, frogs, snakes, bees, snails and fish. If rice no longer comes with husk, broken grains and straw, he asks, what will cattle, goats, ducks and chickens eat?
As an example he describes Hawriachala, a village in Kaliakair, Gazipur. Sunil Chandra Barman, from a once comfortable farming family, is now a day labourer. His father and grandfather grew many rice varieties on the sal forest land, among them binni, kalijira and rajashail, and his mother cooked "bokni" in winter from sprouted gudhoi or bonkosh rice. The family can no longer make it for lack of the ingredients, and their daughter, a garment worker, has never eaten it.
Bangladesh has registered hilsa, kalijira rice, Fazli and Khirsapat mangoes, Sundarbans honey, date-palm molasses and many other products as geographical indications. Yet many foods, from the haor's "muchi" to the Mandi people's "khari", are disappearing, he writes. He proposes that local schools and union councils draw up village "food-memory maps", and that regional rural recipes be documented with their intellectual property protected.
The views expressed are the writer's own.
Source: Prothom Alo
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