In March 2017, Bangladesh’s largest daily newspaper, the Dhaka Tribune, carried an article that tobacco cultivation in the hilly district of Bandarban in Chittagong Division “raised hackles again” as some tobacco companies had begun offering incentives in cash and kind to attract marginal farmers to take up tobacco cultivation.
The newspaper said these efforts were “largely successful due to an absence of anti-tobacco farming drives by the local administration over the last two to three years.”
Bandarban once had a nationwide reputation for growing diverse crops like paddy, maize, potato, eggplant, long gourd, bean, radish, cauliflower, and cabbage. But now, the newspaper said, acres after acres of farmland in the district were being used to farm tobacco, in the meantime far exceeding the limit of 1,000 hectares that had been set by a district judge in 2010.
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“Tobacco companies are providing cash loans and fertilizers in advance and they buy the harvested leaves. This is the reason [why] the farmers are bent on tobacco cultivation,” Mobarak Hossain, a tobacco farmer from Chhagalkhaia village, was quoted by the newspaper as saying. Another farmer who had switched to tobacco, Nazir Ahmed, said that while tobacco company representatives frequently visited growers, “the government’s agriculture officials do not show up even when the farmers are in dire straits to save their vegetables farms.”
Meanwhile, Shah Alam, another farmer, was quoted in the article as saying that tobacco farming was “gaining momentum as it is more profitable.” The farmers interviewed for the article all explained that they were happily switching when approached by tobacco companies and being offered free seeds as well as being provided with cash loans and fertilizer on easy conditions in times of need, because they felt neglected by the government. Indeed so enticing for farmers is the prospect of turning a decent profit from tobacco, the Dhaka Tribune article highlighted, that apart from arable lands even school grounds, protected forest areas, and sand bars in the Matamuhuri river have by now been misappropriated and turned into tobacco fields.
But with Bandarban’s ensuing tobacco rush also tagged along an environmental problem, according to the newspaper: The flue-curing process uses tremendous amounts of precious firewood in a country that is largely denuded of dense forest cover except for a few remote districts along its western and eastern borders. The flue-curing ovens, locally known as “tandurs”, are burning around 100,000 tons of wood to process the 1.75 million bales of tobacco that are now being annually produced in Bandarban district alone. The newspaper quoted an agriculture ministry official as saying that while the ministry’s Department of Agricultural Extension “has been discouraging tobacco farming” there was little the government could do as “farmers want more profits.”