When SOS stands for 'save our soils'!

Abid Anwar

Photo: Wahid Adnan/Driknews

UNBELIEVABLE though, it's really out there in a small town named Enterprise under Coffee County of Alabama, USA! The citizenry erected a monument in honour of an insect on their downtown square to glorify its role in heralding a prosperous life for them.

The structure, called Boll Weevil Monument, is dedicated to bollworms that were repeatedly damaging cotton-bolls just before maturity to yield fibrous output. As in most other southern states, the main crop in Alabama was primarily cotton for many years. Repeated attacks by bollworm originated innovative ideas among agricultural policy-makers and farmers to grow alternative crops. Crop diversification magically improved the health of their economy, and they happily paid their due tribute to those deprived weevils.

Though not forced by such a devastating pest attack on our staple, similar changes in the rice-based cropping system in Bangladesh might boost up agricultural productivity and ensure better nutrition of people but our barriers to implementation are many. Ours is mostly a subsistence-level farming, and not export-oriented. One may argue: unless we can achieve self-sufficiency in rice production to feed the hungry millions, it would not be wise to allocate rice-growing lands for cultivation of other crops however profitable and beneficial these might be. Campaigns for changing the food-habit of people end in failure because they are not ready to compromise with what they have chosen as their main food from time immemorial. Even with this reality, the country requires a major shift in its cropping pattern for some biochemical factors that will help improve or at least retain the fertility of soils. The long-term consequence of growing the same crop on the same soil is horrifying.

The term 'recuperation' equally relates to the recovery of physical or mental condition of a patient and the health of soil from continuous exposure to a common condition. The biochemical process in the uptake of nutrients by plants from hygroscopic water through osmosis varies from species to species. Crop rotation is a therapy for soil's health in that it facilitates a natural balance of the essential plant-nutrients. Continuous growing of the same crop on the same land is likely to result in the total exhaustion of a particular kind of plant-nutrient and unnecessary storage of the other kinds. Crop rotation is the only means to stop this phenomenon. To exemplify, rice-plants consume a huge amount of nitrogenous fertilizer both from the soil's own reservoir and externally-applied urea whereas legumes add this to the soil from air and uptake others from soil for their proper growth.

A crop diversification porogramme in Bangladesh is in place since the 1990s intensified initially with Canadian funding and later supported by other development partners like JICA, DFID, etc. Although specific recommendations have been made based on various cropping systems research in our own setting, translation of the findings into action still remains a cry in the wilderness. Farmers' reluctance and the Government's critical position to or not to compromise with rice production are the underlying reasons behind this slow progress. We have reached a stage to implement the programme even if we need to import more rice than at present. Since the issues of increased productivity and better nutrition have repeatedly failed to convince the farmers, an SOS (Save Our Soils!)--as I like to term--can be the guiding value in our message for the future campaigns.

The writer is a chemist, poet, literary critic, and lyricist.