Sundarban Farmers Need a Rice Variety That Is Salt-Tolerant But Also Marketable -Snigdhendu Bhattacharya

-TheWire.in

The increasing frequency of cyclones means growing high-yielding varieties – which do not grow well on saline soil – is no longer an option.

Kolkata: Cyclone Aila of 2009 had triggered a wave of migration from the Sundarbans region, after the storm surges associated with the cyclone inundated thousands of acres of land with saline water from the rivers and the seas and left them uncultivable for years to come. It took a few years for the land to get back to normal yielding capacity.

Now, with two cyclonic storms hitting the region in back-to-back years – Cyclone Yaas of May 2021 after Cyclone Amphan of May 2020 – and flooding large swathes of farmland, will the Sunderbans see another wave of migration once the situation over the COVID-19 pandemic improves?

That possibility cannot be ruled out because the prospect of losses in the agriculture sector in the coming years looms large and there is no visible solution to this as of now.

The rice varieties that have a high yield and fetch a good price in the market will not grow on the high-salinity soil, and the salt-tolerant rice varieties that can grow on these lands usually produce lower yields and hardly fetch a price in the market. Most of the salt-tolerant varieties produce thick grains.

“There will be no crops on thousands of acres of land for two years straight,” said Sunderban development minister Bankim Hazra, an MLA from Sagar, one of the areas worst hit by the storm surges.

“The impact of Yaas has been ten times higher than that of Amphan. In Amphan, tree and electric poles fell, houses were razed. But here, thousands of acres of land and ponds have been inundated in saline water. Agriculture, pisciculture and horticulture will be severely hurt,” he added.

According to Hazra, considering that the normal high-yielding rice varieties, referred to as HYVs, can no longer be grown in the land for a few seasons, chief minister Mamata Banerjee has asked the department to distribute seeds of salt-tolerant rice varieties. The government had been working on salt-tolerant varieties for the past few years and the project has taken shape from last year, Hazra added.

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