By Shimul Biswas from Manikgonj
60-year-old Krishani Rahima Begum of Nayabari village of Singair upazila has become an ideal farmer. She helps her husband in all his work to provide food for the family. In order to provide nutrition and safe food to the family members, she has developed an ideal agricultural farm on 35 decimal of homestead land. Making the most of this piece of land next to the house, she regularly cultivates diverse crops throughout the year.
In the current Rabi season, she has cultivated round potato, sweet potato, tomato, cabbage, cabbage, radish, stewery, kwash, onion, garlic, brinjal, pepper, mustard, sunflower, gujitil, firingi, sugarcane, saffron fruits and various crops. On the other hand, she has decorated her house in the pattern of an ideal agricultural house by cultivating ginger and turmeric in the fallow land of the house and gourd, beans, and kidney bean in the yard of the house. She is also directly involved in livestock rearing. However, in order to produce safe and poison-free food, with the help of her husband, she independently prepares and uses organic fertilizers and organic pesticides. Therefore, the crops produced by Rahima Begum meet the nutritional needs of her family members and earn her cash by selling the surplus.
“Climate change crises are now a serious threat to people of all walks of life. The impact of climate change is the worst in the case of those who are engaged in nature-based agriculture”-said Rahima Begum. She narrates the stories of various experiences of her long life in an exclusive interview. She said that presently nature is misbehaving. In a country with six seasons, there are no other three seasons except summer, monsoon and winter. Therefore, the current nature dependent agriculture system is most threatened due to less of rainfall, untimely rains, extreme heat levels, dense fogs, light fogs throughout the year, irregular monsoons and flash floods. She said that farmers buy all the agricultural materials from the market which increases their production cost leading farmers not to be profitable persuing agriculture as their profession. On the other hand, energy intensive agriculture increases the level of food poisoning day by day due to the use of more chemical fertilizers and poisons which is an extreme threat to public health.
In 2013, farmer Rahima Begum joined the Naya Bari Krishak Krishan organization (Farmers’ organization) organized with the facilitation support from BARCIK. Even now she is an active member of the organization. The farmers of this organization gained knowledge and skills on natural resource dependent agriculture and ecology by participating in the training organized by BARCIK. That’s why Rahima Begum’s style of agriculture is very different from the current agriculture. She produces safe and poison-free food on her land by controlling pests with self-collected seeds, organic fertilizers and natural materials. She does not cultivate crops but also conserves the seeds of each crop. She has developed a seed bank of various crops and conserves all those seeds in that seed bank. Rahima Begum has been playing a major role in meeting the needs of the farmers in times of crisis from the seed bank. She so far, has provided seeds to more than four hundred people with free of cost. Rahima Begum said, “If you do agriculture using natural resources, the production cost is low and you can get food free of poisons”
Translated by Silvanus Lamin
