Leaf growing on the rise

Tobacco cultivation in Bangladesh’s Teesta Irrigation Project area has been increasing in recent times as the Water Development Board has been unable to provide adequate water supplies to rice farmers, according to a story in The Daily Star.

The story said that a number of agronomists, physicians and environmentalists had expressed their concern over the increase in tobacco farming.

But some farmers have little choice. One farmer was quoted as saying that his land was situated along a remote part of a side canal where water hardly reached, and to avoid uncertainty, he had cultivated tobacco, which required the least irrigation.

During a recent visit to villages in the project area, a Star correspondent said he had found that tobacco has been cultivated on thousands of acres of land on the sides of narrow Teesta canals.

And Union Parishad [local government] chairman at Ramnagar [in the Feni District of the Chittagong Division], Mizanur Rahman, was quoted as saying that cultivation of tobacco had been almost doubled in the project area in the past couple of years because many farmers did not get access to irrigation facilities.