Sunflowers Put Khulna's Fallow Saline Land Back to Work

Most of Bangladesh's edible oil is bought from abroad, and the import bill drains a large amount of foreign currency every year. For several years the country has looked for a way to narrow that gap, and one of the newer answers lies on the salty, low-lying land of the south-west. By March 2026, farmers across the Khulna region were growing sunflowers on fields that had for years lain fallow after the aman rice harvest, under a government-backed extension drive, and agriculture officers said land that once gave nothing in the dry months had turned into sheets of yellow.

Four kinds of edible oil are used most in the country: mustard, rice bran, soybean and sunflower. The government has tried to lift the output of all four, and the sunflower push on the coast's fallow, saline land is one strand of that effort. Officials of the Department of Agricultural Extension (DAE) said the crop was being grown with government support in the rabi season, in the gap between the aman and boro rice harvests, mainly through the department's PARTNER project.

In the 2024-25 financial year the country imported 14,406 tonnes of sunflower oil, DAE officials said, against a usual home output of only about 10,000 to 12,000 tonnes a year. Raising that home output, and bringing idle land back into use, is the stated aim of the Khulna drive.

The Khulna agricultural region is made up of four districts: Narail, Satkhira, Khulna and Bagerhat. About 57 per cent of its land is saline, DAE officials said, and after the aman rice is cut roughly two and a half lakh hectares lie fallow through the Kharif-1 season. Land is generally called saline once its salinity reaches about 8 decisiemens per metre (dS/m); sunflowers, by contrast, can tolerate up to around 15 dS/m, which is why extension officers describe the crop as one of the most promising options for the area.

The salinity itself is long-standing and well mapped. According to a study by the Soil Resource Development Institute (SRDI), of about 8.1 million hectares of arable land in Bangladesh, some 1.02 million hectares spread across 19 coastal districts are affected by salinity to varying degrees. The problem is heaviest in the south-west: of the roughly 560,000 hectares in the five coastal districts of Khulna, Satkhira, Bagerhat, Patuakhali and Barguna, the institute's figures put salinity between 8.1 and 16 dS/m. Most traditional crops can withstand only about 0.7 dS/m, and even the salt-tolerant rice varieties bred for the coast reach their limit near 8 to 12 dS/m. SRDI has also recorded fresh farmland slipping into salinity at an average of about 6,200 hectares a year.

SRDI sorts the land into bands by how salty it is: slightly saline at roughly 2 to 4 dS/m, moderately saline at 4 to 8, saline at 8 to 15, and strongly saline above 15 dS/m. Much of the coastal south-west falls in the higher bands, which is exactly why a crop that copes with up to about 15 dS/m matters here, where even the best salt-tolerant rice gives out.

Salinity rises in the coastal belt when the dry-season flow of the rivers falls and sea water pushes further inland, and it is worst from roughly November to March, exactly the months when the aman fields would otherwise sit empty. For farm families in these districts that has long meant a single rice crop and then idle ground, and it is this idle, salty window that the sunflower is meant to fill.

The sunflower, Helianthus annuus, is a tall annual of the daisy family Asteraceae. It was first domesticated in the Americas and is native to the central and western United States, southern Canada and northern Mexico, but it is now grown across most of the temperate world and ranks among the most widely used vegetable oils. World output of sunflower seed reached about 51.9 million tonnes in 2024, with Russia and Ukraine together accounting for well over half of the total.

The plant suits the Khulna experiment for several reasons that officers and researchers point to. Its roots go deep, about 15 inches, against the 6 to 8 inches of a rice plant, so it can draw moisture from lower in the soil and survive with little irrigation; the farmers interviewed stressed that sunflowers need far less standing water than rice. Its life cycle is short, 85 to 105 days, which lets it slot neatly into the gap between the aman and boro rice seasons. It tolerates salt far better than rice. And its fallen leaves add organic matter, so the crop that follows needs less fertiliser.

Young sunflower heads track the sun across the sky each day, a movement known as heliotropism; once the stem stops growing and the flower matures, the head settles facing east, which warms it quickly in the morning and draws more pollinators. Internationally the crop is usually grown in rotation with cereals, soybean or rapeseed, a pattern that cuts idle periods and lifts total output, much as the Khulna plan slots it between two rice crops.

Two kinds of seed were handed out in the region: a hybrid and the open-pollinated BARI Surjamukhi-3, a variety released by the Bangladesh Agricultural Research Institute (BARI). The difference matters to a smallholder, officials said: a farmer cannot keep hybrid seed usefully for the next season and must buy it again, while BARI Surjamukhi-3 seed can be saved and resown. Sunflower seed itself comes in oilseed and confectionery types; the oilseed kind pressed in Khulna also yields a cake used as livestock feed, and the stalks can be burned as fuel. The plant is sturdy enough that it is grown elsewhere as a cover crop and even used to pull heavy metals such as lead out of contaminated soil, but in Khulna its value is simpler: a cash oil crop on ground that grew nothing.

Across the four districts, extension staff set up demonstration plots, and by the time the fields were visited large stands were in full bloom; from a distance they looked like a yellow carpet, and up close thousands of flower heads swayed in the wind. The flowers were of the BARI Surjamukhi-3 variety, and in some plots a single head, the seed disc, weighed more than a kilogram.

Kamrul Islam, a farmer from Chanchra village in Tularam union of Narail Sadar upazila, grew sunflowers for the first time this year. “A few years ago nothing grew on this land after the aman harvest; it just lay fallow,” he said. “Because the salt comes up, I thought planting anything would only add to my costs. But this time I grew sunflowers on the officers' advice, and the yield has amazed me.”

In Alka village of Damodar union in Phultala upazila of Khulna, six farmers together planted two acres. One of them, Rezaul Karim, said it was their first attempt: “If the yield holds, the profit will be double that of rice. The land used to sit empty; now a crop is growing at low cost, and another advantage is that sunflowers do not need much irrigation water.” A neighbour, Anisur Rahman, 32, said he had never seen such a crop in the area and had planted a bigha himself.

In Atjuri union of Mollahat upazila in Bagerhat, sub-assistant agriculture officer Sumala Biswas said four farmers, Peyari Begum, Bachchu Mia, Nizam Molla and A. Halim Molla, had grown BARI Surjamukhi-3 on two acres, with flower heads about 15 inches across carrying more than a kilogram of seed each. Phultala upazila agriculture officer Arif Hossain said extension staff had deliberately planted the first demonstrations in important sites such as the cantonment and police lines, because ordinary farmers were reluctant to try an unfamiliar crop; once neighbours saw those yields, he said, interest spread among them.

By the extension officers' reckoning the crop is cheap to grow. For 33 decimals, one bigha, of BARI Surjamukhi-3, about Tk 4,000 of seed is needed, and with the other costs a bigha can be brought to harvest for roughly Tk 7,000 to Tk 8,000. Put another way, officers said, a sunflower crop costs about three and a half thousand taka an acre against a return of around Tk 25,000.

The yield they quote is seven and a half to eight maunds of seed a bigha. A kilogram of seed gives at least 400 grams of oil, so at seven and a half maunds, about 300 kilograms, a bigha yields roughly 130 litres of oil; at Tk 250 a kilogram that is worth about Tk 32,000, before counting the oilcake and the dried stalks used as fuel. To lower the barrier further, the government supplies an input package for each bigha: one kilogram of seed and ten kilograms each of DAP, TSP and potash, among other items. That package costs the state about Tk 3,500, officials said, while the crop it produces is worth at least about Tk 26,000.

Those are the officers' figures. The farmers' own accounts were more cautious, framed as hopes for a first season rather than settled results; several said only that if the yield held, the return would beat rice. Because recommended rates for seed treatment and any fungicide vary with local conditions, farmers were advised to follow the dose set by their upazila agriculture office rather than a fixed figure.

The sunflower's short season is central to its appeal on the coast. Because the plant matures in 85 to 105 days, it fits into the fallow stretch between the aman and boro rice harvests without pushing either crop aside, and once it is cut the same land can take jute, rice, sesame, mung bean, dhaincha or a green-manure crop. Officers said the deep roots and the leaf fall leave the soil in better heart for whatever comes next, so less fertiliser is needed on the following crop.

The crop is not confined to open fields. Officials said sunflowers can be grown on pond banks, on the raised ridges between fields and in homestead yards, almost anywhere high enough to drain, which widens the land available without taking ground from rice. Sunflowers are sown shallow, only about an inch deep, and need watching for diseases such as downy mildew, especially where the soil stays wet, so the extension staff paired the seed with training. Even so, the farmers across the four districts were growing the crop for the first time this season, and officers said the real test would be whether the early interest held into later years.

Behind the field-level drive is a national problem. Only about 15 per cent of the country's edible oil is produced at home, officials said, and the remaining 85 per cent is imported, at a cost of roughly Tk 16,000 crore a year. Md Mosaddek Hossain, senior monitoring officer of the PARTNER project for the Khulna region, said bringing fallow, saline land under sunflowers after the aman harvest could cut that import share and save a great deal of foreign currency; otherwise, he warned, the country would remain “held hostage” by oil importers.

The scale of the shortfall is clear from trade data. The Bangladesh Trade and Tariff Commission has put annual edible-oil demand at around 24 lakh tonnes, close to 90 per cent of it met by imports, with palm and soybean oil making up the bulk; a United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) estimate for 2022-23 put soybean oil use near 9.85 lakh tonnes and palm oil around 17 lakh tonnes. Against those volumes the 14,406 tonnes of sunflower oil imported in 2024-25, and the 10,000 to 12,000 tonnes produced at home, are small, which is exactly why officials see room to grow the domestic crop.

Mosaddek said the Khulna region alone has about 13 lakh 13 thousand hectares of land, of which 18 to 20 per cent lies fallow after the aman season. If even half the country's oil demand could in time be met from such fallow land, he said, the saving in foreign currency would be large, because sunflowers can be fitted onto pond banks, field ridges and homestead ground as well as into the fallow fields themselves.

The Khulna drive runs through the DAE's Program on Agricultural and Rural Transformation for Nutrition, Entrepreneurship and Resilience in Bangladesh, known as PARTNER. The World Bank, which is financing the programme together with the International Fund for Agricultural Development, describes PARTNER as a five-year effort, running from 2023, to diversify farming, improve food safety and build climate resilience across the country's agricultural regions, with the DAE as lead agency. Under it, Khulna farmers were given seed, fertiliser, pesticide and training.

Officials set out what had been distributed. Md Rafiqul Islam, additional director of the DAE for the Khulna region, said 10,350 farmers had each been given seed and fertiliser for one bigha, and that under the project seed, fertiliser and financial support had gone to two acres in each of 40 blocks, bringing about 1,600 hectares under sunflowers this season. Eight oil-extraction machines had been shared among 30 upazilas under a regional agricultural-adaptation project, he said, with a plan to place one in every upazila in time. If the two and a half lakh fallow hectares could gradually be brought into cultivation, he added, farmers could grow not only sunflowers but mung bean, dhaincha and green-manure crops too, and a family that harvested about 100 kilograms, or two and a half maunds, of seed could meet its own cooking-oil needs for a year.

Abul Kalam Azad, the PARTNER project's programme coordinator, tied the effort to the wider climate threat. Because of climate change, he said, the Khulna region is among the most vulnerable in the country, and rising salinity leaves much land fallow; encouraging sunflowers was a way to put that ground to use, and farmers were already getting good results. Sunflower oil, he said, is good for health, but import dependence keeps it expensive, and only higher home production would make it more affordable for ordinary people.

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

Sources: Jagonews24; Soil Resource Development Institute (SRDI); Bangladesh Agricultural Research Institute (BARI); Department of Agricultural Extension (DAE); World Bank; U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA).