Haor Boro Flood Losses: A Call for an Integrated Policy to Protect Farmers

On 9 May 2026, while farmers in Bangladesh's north-eastern haor wetlands were still counting the boro paddy drowned by late-April rain and hill runoff, Jagonews24 published an opinion column by Sayed Uzzal, a central joint coordinator of the NCP's farmers' wing, under the title "Sinking Paddy, Sinking Lives: Haor Farmers' Fight to Survive". The writer argued that natural disasters, mismanagement, market syndicates and gaps in policy keep haor farmers in a state of permanent uncertainty, and that saving haor farming needs an integrated, practical and farmer-centred policy with effective implementation, not piecemeal steps.

In the column he described a region where farmers grow only one crop a year, boro paddy, so that a whole year's livelihood rests on it. Early floods, weak embankments, unplanned infrastructure and blocked water flow, he wrote, often leave ripe paddy under water, and research and reports say unplanned and poorly built embankments and their breaches often add to the damage. He also pointed to a second crisis after the harvest: with no place to dry paddy in the rain and no modern warehouses, cut grain spoils, farmers are forced to sell cheaply, and middlemen and syndicates profit. This report sets out his arguments and demands alongside what the Department of Agricultural Extension (DAE), the ministries, the Water Development Board, researchers and newspapers had reported on the same subjects up to the day the column appeared.

The writer's first demand concerned the market. He called for the government to buy paddy directly from farmers during the procurement season, without middlemen, to increase the capacity of government warehouses and to ensure that marginal farmers can take part, so that they sell at a fair price. A digital and transparent marketing system, he argued, could break the hold of market syndicates.

He then listed demands that, in his words, haor farmers have been making for a long time:

• permanent repair of weak embankments and a lasting system of protection;
• a better early flood warning system;
• implementation of an integrated haor management master plan;
• more farm mechanisation and enough combine harvesters;
• quick harvesting in emergencies with the help of the local administration and the army;
• crop-pledge loans, and the waiving or rescheduling of loans taken by farmers who lost their crop;
• crop insurance, to give farmers some protection against natural disasters;
• cash and food aid in emergencies, and quick rehabilitation based on lists of affected farmers.

He wrote that measures of the last kind mostly remain temporary and that long-term structural change is rarely seen. His central criticism was that development in the haor had been confined to roads and large projects, when planning must fit the region's nature, water flow, farming and way of life. The haor, he wrote, is not just a geographical area but a sensitive economy that depends on its environment, where even a small policy mistake can bring disaster to thousands of farmers.

The column appeared about two weeks after the rain that set off the crisis. The bdnews24 correspondent in Sunamganj reported on 2 May that a downpour on 27 April had filled the haors and submerged the crops. In the 24 hours from 27 to 28 April, according to the figures in that report, Derai recorded 205 millimetres of rain, Sunamganj 137 millimetres, Laur 133 millimetres and Chhatak 76 millimetres, against 27 millimetres on the same date the year before. Farmers there use a local word, "kanchaira", for such a wet year, and told the reporter that waterlogging of this kind returns every five, ten, fifteen or twenty years.

Elsewhere in the region the figures were similar. The Daily Star reported on 29 April that the Srimangal weather station had recorded 290 millimetres of rain in five days, and that the Water Development Board had measured about 104 millimetres in Habiganj in the 24 hours to the morning of 28 April. On 1 May the same paper reported a seven-day forecast from the flood forecasting centre that the Surma-Kushiyara, Dhanu-Baulai and Bhugai-Kangsha rivers could cross their danger levels together by 3 May, with 150 to 350 millimetres of rain expected, and that conditions might improve after 5 May.

Nationally, Prothom Alo reported on 4 May that the Bangladesh Meteorological Department had found April's rainfall more than 75 per cent above normal, the highest for the month in nine years; the department had not seen this much April rain since 2017. April is usually the country's hottest month, with an average temperature of 33.2 degrees Celsius. Md. Bazlur Rashid, a senior meteorologist at the department, told the paper that the rise in pre-monsoon and post-monsoon rainfall was a new trend and that climate change was the main cause.

Official estimates of the damage changed from day to day as the water rose, and each figure below is given as its source stated it, with its date. On 1 May The Daily Star quoted DAE data that about 17 per cent of the haor boro crop was at risk of flooding as of Thursday, 30 April, and Md. Jamal Uddin, the DAE's additional director for monitoring and implementation, said 63.91 per cent of the haor paddy had been harvested by then. The paper put the boro area in the seven haor districts, Sylhet, Sunamganj, Moulvibazar, Habiganj, Netrokona, Kishoreganj and Brahmanbaria, at 9.63 lakh hectares, about half of it in the haor itself, with more than 77,000 hectares at risk.

By 4 May, Prothom Alo reported, the DAE's field-monitoring (Sarejamin) wing headed by director Md. Obaidur Rahman Mondal put the boro area in the haors of the seven districts at 4,55,153 hectares, of which 71 per cent had been harvested and about 46,000 hectares had gone under water. A senior DAE official told the paper that estimates were being kept conservative because rice prices vary from area to area, while local groups said the official figures understated the damage.

On 8 May, the day before the column, The Daily Star reported Agriculture Ministry figures that boro on 49,073 hectares, about 11 per cent of the haor cropland, had been damaged and that a further 17.5 per cent of land was at risk, according to Md. Selim Khan, additional secretary of the ministry's extension wing. More than 2,36,000 farmers in the seven districts were affected, and officials put the damage at Tk 1,047 crore. DAE figures in the same report said about 80 per cent of the 4.55 lakh hectares planted in the haors had been harvested.

District offices gave their own figures in the same days:

• Sunamganj: boro on about 2,23,511 hectares in 137 haors and the surrounding land, 1,65,275 hectares of it in haor areas; the district agriculture office's preliminary estimate was 18,000 hectares damaged by rain and hill runoff and 2,000 hectares lost earlier to waterlogging, a loss of about Tk 500 crore (Prothom Alo, 3 May). Deputy director Mohammad Omar Faruk said the final figure would be higher. Mohammad Raju Ahmed, president of the Sunamganj Haor and River Protection Movement, put the damage at no less than 50,000 hectares.
• Kishoreganj: 9,045 hectares of paddy submerged and more than 30,000 farmers affected, according to the district agriculture extension office (Prothom Alo, 3 May); DAE deputy director Md. Sadikur Rahman estimated the district's loss at about Tk 300 crore (The Daily Star, 8 May).
• Netrokona: boro on 1,86,000 hectares, 42,000 of them in haors; 13,466 hectares submerged by the official count, with local people saying the real loss was about twice that (Prothom Alo, 3 May); DAE deputy director Amirul Islam said about 80,000 farmers in the district were affected (The Daily Star, 8 May).
• Habiganj: boro on 1,23,644 hectares; additional deputy director Dwipak Kumar Pal said about 2,710 hectares were submerged (The Daily Star, 29 April).
• Moulvibazar: boro on 62,400 hectares, 27,355 of them in haors, with about 77 per cent of the haor paddy harvested; deputy director Md. Jalal Uddin said the extent of the loss had not yet been determined (The Daily Star, 29 April).

The reports also bore out the problem the column raised after the harvest. Prothom Alo reported on 3 May that farmers saw cut paddy rotting after days without sun to dry it, and that some threw wet grain into the haor water.

Banglapedia, the national encyclopaedia, describes a haor as a large, saucer-shaped tectonic depression that receives runoff from rivers and canals, becomes a vast water body in the monsoon and largely dries out afterwards; the word is thought to come from the Sanskrit "sagar", the sea. The basin holds about 47 major haors and some 6,300 beels, about 3,500 of them permanent and 2,800 seasonal. It is ringed by the hills of Meghalaya to the north, Tripura to the south and Manipur to the east, and is fed by the Surma, Kushiyara, Manu, Khowai, Jadukata, Piyain, Mogra and other rivers. In the monsoon the water stands up to six metres deep and the land stays flooded for about seven to eight months.

The 2012 Master Plan of Haor Area, prepared by the Bangladesh Haor and Wetland Development Board under the Ministry of Water Resources, counts 373 haors and wetlands in Sunamganj, Sylhet, Habiganj, Moulvibazar, Netrokona, Kishoreganj and Brahmanbaria, covering about 8,59,000 hectares, around 43 per cent of the area of those districts.

When the water drains in winter, the exposed silt is planted with boro rice, which is harvested in April and May before the next floods. An article in IRRI's Rice Today in May 2025 stated that boro covers more than 80 per cent of the land in the haor region and, citing the Bangladesh Bureau of Statistics for 2023, that the haor wetlands produce 25 per cent of the country's boro rice and 15 per cent of its annual rice output. Banglapedia notes that the spread of boro onto the marginal land of the wetlands has itself drained large areas and threatens them.

The national figures show why a haor loss worries the whole country. According to official figures reported by The Daily Star on 8 May 2026, boro was planted on 50.50 lakh hectares in fiscal year 2025-26, 3.29 per cent more than the year before, against a production target of 2.24 crore tonnes; output had been 2.13 crore tonnes in 2024-25, and boro makes up about 55 per cent of the country's rice. The paper's 1 May report said the seven haor districts supplied about one fifth of national production in the previous season.

The column's charge that unplanned embankments add to the damage was a live debate in the region that season. Since the 2017 disaster, crop-protection embankments in the haor have been built and repaired by Project Implementation Committees (PICs) of local farmers under the revised "Kajer Binimoye Taka" (cash for work) rules of 2017. The Daily Star reported in 2022 that under the policy the committees must be formed by 30 November, start work by 15 December and finish by 28 February, before the flash-flood season.

The bdnews24 report of 2 May 2026 set out the Water Development Board's figures for Sunamganj alone: 734 projects costing Tk 103 crore in 2023-24, 684 projects costing Tk 145 crore in 2024-25, and 718 projects costing about Tk 150 crore in 2025-26, with 2,136 embankments built or repaired over the three years. Farmers and haor campaigners told the reporter that over the past decade embankments built in the name of crop protection had blocked the channels that once let rainwater drain out, and some farmers alleged that the earthwork figures on paper were higher than the work actually done; the report carried no response from the board to that allegation.

Md. Imdadul Haque, an executive engineer of the board in Sunamganj, told bdnews24 that haphazard development in the haor was one of the main causes of the waterlogging, and acknowledged that embankment soil was silting canals, rivers and water bodies every year. Abdul Hai Chowdhury, director of the research organisation AIRD, argued that the crisis was not purely natural but rooted in weak policy and poor implementation, and criticised the PIC and KABIKHA systems for inefficiency and weak accountability. Md. Mamun Haoladar, executive engineer of the board in Sunamganj, told Prothom Alo that silt had filled haor beds and rivers and that structures built on them blocked drainage; he said no board embankment in Sunamganj had breached that year, yet the crop had still been heavily damaged. Agricultural economist Professor Abdus Sattar Mondal told the paper that the haor's landforms had changed, partly through human activity, so farming and the choice of crops would have to change too.

The column's call for direct purchase from farmers and more warehouse space came as the government was adjusting its boro procurement because of the flood. The Daily Star reported on 1 May that a food ministry notification brought the start of procurement forward to 3 May in six haor districts, Netrokona, Kishoreganj, Sunamganj, Sylhet, Moulvibazar and Habiganj, instead of the 15 May set earlier. The season's target was 18 lakh tonnes of paddy and rice from the domestic market: 5 lakh tonnes of paddy, 12 lakh tonnes of boiled rice and 1 lakh tonnes of atap rice, at Tk 36 a kilogram for paddy, Tk 49 for boiled rice and Tk 48 for atap rice, along with 50,000 tonnes of wheat at Tk 36 a kilogram, with the drive running until 31 August.

On drying, The Daily Star reported that a high-level meeting chaired by the food secretary had agreed to let farmers dry paddy at private mills and government warehouses with divisional support, and that the food directorate's director of procurement said the directorate would buy dried paddy directly and encourage millers to buy quickly. Wet paddy fetched far less: in the paper's 8 May report a farmer in Khaliajuri, Netrokona, said he had sold wet paddy at Tk 600 a maund, and a farmer in a Sunamganj haor said he was selling at Tk 700 a maund.

On the wider market, economist Abdul Bayes told The Daily Star on 1 May that the national price impact would be very small and that government stocks of about 13 lakh tonnes would help prevent major instability, while a trader leader in Nawabganj said the situation would be clear within 10 to 15 days.

The writer's warning that farmers borrow at high interest when loans on easy terms are not available matched what The Daily Star found in the haor that month. Its reporters spoke with more than 40 farmers in the seven districts, and more than 25 of them described a debt trap: loans taken at interest, in some cases to lease land, to be repaid from a harvest that had gone under water. The paper quoted Abdul Bayes, a former vice-chancellor of Jahangirnagar University, recommending loan rescheduling, repayment in instalments or interest waivers.

Formal farm credit for the year had been set in August 2025, when Bangladesh Bank announced an agricultural and rural loan target of Tk 39,000 crore for 2025-26, 2.63 per cent higher than the previous year's Tk 38,000 crore, and waived credit information bureau charges for loans up to Tk 2.5 lakh, The Business Standard reported.

The government's response up to 9 May was reported as follows. On 29 April, when a Sunamganj member of parliament raised the haor situation under rule 71 in the Jatiya Sangsad, Prime Minister Tarique Rahman said the affected farmers would be identified and the government would try to give them support for the next three months, bdnews24 reported. The Daily Star reported on 8 May that the Prime Minister had directed officials to prepare an accurate and transparent list of genuinely affected farmers, according to his press wing, and that the disaster management and relief minister had announced three months of food support through a special card system, to begin within days.

Part of the risk lies in the calendar. IRRI's Rice Today reported in May 2025 that haor farmers have long relied on BRRI dhan28 and BRRI dhan29, which take 140 to 160 days to mature, while flash floods now arrive as early as the first week of April, before the harvest. A project led by IRRI with the Bangladesh Rice Research Institute (BRRI) and funded by the Krishi Gobeshona Foundation was developing cold-tolerant varieties for the haor with a growth duration of 120 to 140 days and a yield potential of 6 to 7 tonnes a hectare.

In November 2025 IRRI and its partner Friends in Village Development Bangladesh held field days in Kishoreganj and Sunamganj where farmers assessed BRRI dhan49, dhan87, dhan93, dhan94, dhan103 and the new dhan111. IRRI reported in December 2025 that farmers ranked dhan94 and dhan103 highest for yield, resilience and overall performance, and that BRRI dhan111, tested in the haor for the first time, survived up to seven days of flooding.

The column's remark that the picture repeats every few years refers to a known history. In April 2017 early flash floods struck before the harvest. The Dhaka Tribune reported on 8 April 2017 that the DAE had found about 23,300 hectares fully inundated in Kishoreganj, that agriculture officials put the submerged area in Habiganj at almost 13,500 hectares, and that officials in Sunamganj said at least 27,000 hectares were already under water. The Daily Star later wrote that the 2017 floods affected more than eight lakh families in six haor districts. After that year the government revised the embankment rules and handed the work to farmers' committees.

In April 2022 hill runoff again broke through. The Daily Star reported on 9 April 2022 that about 7,083 hectares of boro had gone under water, 4,900 of them in Sunamganj, where 520 kilometres of embankment had been built or repaired at a cost of Tk 120 crore; two large embankments broke, at Chandra Shonar Thal in Dharmapasha and at Chaptir Haor in Derai.

The 2026 damage came in a different way. Prothom Alo quoted a farmer in Jamalganj saying that floods had hit before but that waterlogging from rain was new to his area, and the board's engineer said no embankment in Sunamganj had breached.

A public body for the haor has existed in some form for decades. According to the Department of Bangladesh Haor and Wetlands Development, a Haor Development Board was formed by ordinance on 22 February 1977 and abolished on 21 September 1982. The Bangladesh Haor and Wetland Development Board was formed again under the Ministry of Water Resources on 11 September 2000; the cabinet decided on 17 November 2014 to turn it into a department attached to the ministry, and the ministry issued the notification creating the department on 24 July 2016.

The board's 2012 master plan set a framework for 20 years, up to fiscal year 2031-32, covering flood management, agriculture, fisheries and livestock, roads and afforestation. The Daily Star reported in June 2021 that the plan included 36 critical projects, some completed and some under way, and quoted Dr Ali Muhammad Omar Faruque, the department's director of agriculture, water and environment: "Some projects have been completed, but no impact assessment has been conducted." The Business Standard reported in November 2023 that the plan's settlement component, 38 settlement areas on 1,396 hectares and 38 eco-villages, had seen little implementation, and quoted the department's director general: "No progress yet in this regard."

Against that background the writer's demand for an integrated haor master plan, and his complaint that haor development had been reduced to roads and big projects, referred to a plan that already existed on paper. In bdnews24's 2 May report, Abdul Hai Chowdhury of AIRD made a similar point, saying the haor and wetlands department had to move from a "paper" existence to an effective institution.

Photo: Balaram Mahalder / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)

Sources: Jagonews24 (column by Sayed Uzzal, 9 May 2026), The Daily Star (Bangla edition, 29 April, 1 May and 8 May 2026; English edition, 9 April 2022 and 28 June 2021), Prothom Alo (3 and 4 May 2026), bdnews24.com (29 April and 2 May 2026), Banglapedia, Department of Bangladesh Haor and Wetlands Development, Master Plan of Haor Area (2012), IRRI (Rice Today, May 2025; news, December 2025), The Business Standard (10 November 2023; 12 August 2025), Dhaka Tribune (8 April 2017)