Managing Abiotic Stresses With Rice Agriculture to Achieve Sustainable Food Security: Bangladesh Perspective

Abstract Bangladesh is one of the most thickly populated, agriculturally based countries of the world. The crop sector, particularly the rice and rice farming system, is the major source of nutrition to the whole nation and is under serious threat due to climate change. Scientists are concerned about the increasing frequency and intensity of natural catastrophes like drought, floods, flash floods, salinity, extreme temperatures, etc., and the impact of these on rice production. So, priority must be given to developing rice varieties and relevant technologies to adjust to these catastrophic situations. Irrigated (Boro) rice and rainfed lowland rice (T. Aman) are the two dominant rice cultures in Bangladesh which face these climatic adversaries. Bangladeshi scientists are working to develop varieties tolerant to salinity, drought, and submergence. The achievement is praiseworthy, but still not enough to satisfy farmers’ needs. Farmers from the Haor area are in need of short duration production with the tolerance to cold both at seedling as well as in the reproductive stages. The farmers in the Barind area need rice varieties more tolerant to drought. The farmers of the coastal belt need varieties tolerant to both saline and submergence. Bangladesh has attained self-sufficiency in rice just a few years back. The adoption of high yielding varieties, balanced use of chemical fertilizers available in the subsidized rate, increased irrigation facilities, more coverage of fragile lands through the development of stress-tolerant varieties and technologies play the significant role to self-sufficiency in rice. But this self-sufficiency is merely a fragile one as we sometimes experience a sever shock like an early flash flood in the northeastern part haor (wetland) area. In 2017, out of 919,672 hectares of boro cultivated land in that area, 89,233 hectares were washed away due to early flash floods causing a neat loss of at least 597,762 metric tons of clean rice. That shortage of the huge amount of rice incurred a heavy jolt towards the sustainable food security of the country. So, we have to get ready to face not only the flash flood or flood but also with the drought, extreme temperature, the intrusion of more saline water, extreme weather events like sidr, aila, etc. Besides these, awareness buildup regarding climate impact on rice agriculture, more investment on research to develop climate resilient technology, policy support, easy access to the knowledge pool and international understanding is necessary.