Bangladesh News

Sixty-two year old Abul Hossain of Itkhola village in sadar upazila would have earned his retirement by now had he held a job.

Instead he struggles to gather two square meals a day for his family.

For Abul is a marginal farmer in wait for his boro harvest, fighting to keep the hunger wolves from his door as the price of rice keeps rising higher and higher.

With no fixed income or savings, Abul is dependent on his two teen sons working at a tea stall to get the money to buy rice each day.

“What can I do? I have spent all I had to cultivate my fields; till the boro harvest comes through, I have nothing,” he says.

“We just get hungrier and poorer each day,” he adds.

“I took my sons Mintu, 14, and Noor,13, out of school to work. What kind of a father does that?” Abul asks, as the lines on his sad face deepen in pain.

“But I had to.”

To add to his troubles his daughter sent her two young sons to her parents a month ago because she can’t feed them.

“We used to cook rice three times a day and use up 4 kg rice,” his wife Anwara told the Daily Star, “but we can hardly afford 2.5 kg a day now.”

“What can we do, we manage by skipping the morning meal,” she says, voice low in embarrassment.

Abul, who himself looks malnourished, adds, “All farmers here lost part of the amon harvest to floods. Hence most of them are in want now. ”

Abul buys rice from the market at Tk 34 per kg. He says he is frightened to think of how he will last before the boro harvest comes through in a month.

“My sons earn Tk 100 each day. I spend Tk 90 for 2.5 kg rice. How can I manage all else with the remaining Tk 10?” he asks.

Abul has heard about the OMS rice centres where rice costs Tk 25 per kg.

But Abul fires up at the thought of going for what he sees as alms.

He says ”I am a farmer. I own land. Why should I give up my dignity and stand in queue with destitute people?”

Abul’s sons have no work on Fridays and Saturdays and hence no earnings and the family goes hungry those two days. Abul also has the burden of a NGO loan that he has to repay at Tk 150 a week.

To survive, Abul has begun to sell part of his standing boro crop in advance. Some businessmen buy rice, in advance, at Tk 450 a maund, though a maund of rice would fetch Tk 750 to 800 in the market.

The poor farmers in this area, who have nothing to eat now, have no other option.

Abul has already has sold four maunds of rice from his one bigha field. He is worried that if this pattern continues, he might have to sell part of his land as he won’t be getting much from the boro harvest.

His voice chokes as he says, ”I don’t want to sell my land. It is my family’s dignity and the only thing remaining from my forefathers.”

Many other marginal farmers in Nilphamari, like Abul Hossain, do not know whether they will have anything left in the end.