Bangladesh, the world's fourth-largest rice producer, faces a soil salinity crisis

Bangladesh produces about 39 million tons of rice annually to feed 170 million people, but much of this production is threatened by soil salinity and rice farmers' shift to vegetable crops. Abu Siddique writes about this on the Mongabay portal: “Over 30% of cultivable land in Bangladesh is located in the coastal zone. The salinity study found that of the 2.86 million hectares of coastal land, about 1.056 million hectares - an area roughly the size of Lebanon - of arable land is affected by varying levels of salinity, making agricultural production difficult. In coastal areas, farmers mainly grow low-yielding traditional varieties of rice during the rainy season, while during the dry season (January-May) much of the land is left fallow due to salinity. Salinity intrusion, caused by a variety of factors including rising sea levels, commercial shrimp farming and reduced transboundary freshwater flows upstream, is leading to lower rice yields, especially as farmers are slow to adopt ...