For decades, development has been mistakenly equated with concrete highways, flyovers and towers. But concrete doesn鈥檛 feed people; soil does, writes Makhan Lal Dutta
BANGLADESH has one of the smallest farming footprints in the world, but it nevertheless manages to provide food for 170 million people. That is a feat of tenacity and inventiveness. But it is also a gamble. The soil that supports the country is decreasing, eroding and being paved over at a rate that threatens to turn resilience into disaster. What appears to be efficiency today may in fact be fragility disguised.
The arithmetic conveys the story. Bangladesh has the smallest cropland per person in South Asia, with less than a tenth of a hectare each, a figure that has been cut in half since 1980. Farmers have coped by planting two or three rice crops on the same plot of land each year, as well as converting ponds into fish farms that now feed towns and generate foreign exchange. But efficiency has its limitations.听 When the population grows, cities expand, and floods hit harder, the system bends until it breaks.
Farming in Bangladesh is a precarious livelihood. Most farmers have extremely small plots of land, less than half a hectare, that are barely profitable. Because they operate on such razor-thin margins, a single bad harvest can lead to debt. A bad year might even force them to sell their land. This is how land disappears in Bangladesh: not through large-scale seizures, but through quiet, desperate transactions, one impoverished family at a time.
The risks are already here. In 2024, monsoon floods wiped out over a million tonnes of rice, destroying months of labour and forcing Bangladesh to import food. A single climate shock pushed the country from self-sufficiency to a shortfall. These shocks are no longer rare. When they hit land already weakened by over-fertilisation, waterlogging and salinity, recovery becomes even slower and more expensive. The brutal reality is that no amount of human ingenuity can feed a nation if its soil is disappearing.
It鈥檚 tempting to celebrate Bangladesh as a master of adaptation, and in many ways, it is. Submergence-tolerant rice now grows where floods once ruined crops. Aquaculture has boomed around cities, providing protein and livelihoods. These are genuine successes that matter, but they cannot replace land. Innovation can help us use soil more efficiently, but it can鈥檛 create it out of thin air.
The deeper, more silent crisis is underground. Decades of chemical-heavy farming have left the soil tired, compacted, and depleted of organic matter. Salinity is also creeping further inland, especially in coastal areas battered by cyclones and tidal surges. Once soil health collapses, yields plummet, fertiliser costs soar, and farmers face desperation. Restoring fertility is possible, but it takes years, money and patience, luxuries most farmers don鈥檛 have.
The way forward isn鈥檛 a mystery. Other countries have shown how to slow the loss. We can implement zoning laws to protect prime farmland from development and use compact, vertical urban planning to keep cities from swallowing villages. We can also reward farmers who rotate crops, return organic matter to the soil and reduce harmful inputs. Disaster preparedness, from seed banks to early warning systems, can lessen losses from floods and storms. Bangladesh has already piloted all these approaches. The challenge isn鈥檛 a lack of innovation; it鈥檚 a lack of willpower.
There are already success stories. In some districts, community-led land-use planning has balanced urban growth with agricultural preservation. Farmer cooperatives are pooling land to improve their bargaining power and prevent further fragmentation. Peri-urban vegetable farms and regulated aquaculture are meeting the needs of cities without destroying cropland. These are promising signs, but without being scaled up, they will remain isolated examples in a landscape dominated by uncontrolled sprawl.
The core issue is a matter of mindset. For decades, development has been mistakenly equated with concrete highways, flyovers and towers. But concrete doesn鈥檛 feed people; soil does. A city that paves over its food base isn鈥檛 modernising; it鈥檚 devouring its own future. While selling land to developers might boost GDP, the hidden costs will appear later in the form of higher food prices, malnutrition and lost rural livelihoods.
The question is not whether Bangladesh can feed itself in 2025 or 2030, but whether it will have the land to feed itself in 2050. The answer depends on what we choose to protect now. Bangladesh has proven its ability to adapt under pressure time and again. The same ingenuity that grew rice on floodplains and fish in ponds can also protect farmland from sprawl and restore depleted soils. But that ingenuity requires political backing, regulatory power and public recognition that land is not just a commodity.
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Dr Makhan Lal Dutta, an irrigation engineer, is CEO of Harvesting Knowledge Consultancy.听
