Drought dashes the dreams of lychee growers in Kushtia, Bangladesh

The arrival of the luscious fruit is a silver lining every summer—both for the connoisseurs as well as the cultivators of lychee in Bangladesh. However, this lychee season could well turn out to be disappointing, at least for the growers in Kushtia's Khoksha upazila because of something they had no control over—high temperature and drought. A number of lychee farmers in the upazila's Gopgram, Satpakhia, Boroi Chara, Basoa, Daskahunia, Manikat villages told UNB that they had high hopes of a bumper crop this summer, a projection based on the healthy flowering of the fruit three-four months ago. But the cultivators said that unfavourable weather had shattered their hopes. They said it would be really difficult for them to break even this year. Touhidur Rahman, the owner of a lychee farm in Gopgram, said, “A couple of years back, I brought around 20 bighas of land under lychee cultivation. Currently, there are 500 trees in my orchard. But high temperature and inadequate rains have ...