Onion seed growers in Faridpur are worried about being able to attain their expected production levels this year due to unfavorable weather conditions, swarming caterpillar infestations, and low bee pollination. Most onion seed growers claim that the bulbs were damaged due to excessive rain amid cyclone Jawad during the cultivation period. The farmers then planted fresh bulbs but the extreme heat just before harvest burnt the seeds.
In Faridpur, a total 1714 hectares of land across nine upazilas are being used to cultivate onion seeds this year while it was 1,711 hectares last year. Farmers in the district have cultivated different varieties of onion seeds. Due to unusual heat, most of the onion seed stems had dried up while many failed to flower due to a lack of pollination. What’s worse, some of the bulbs had become detached from their stems as swarming caterpillars continue to eat away at them. All the bulbs were damaged due to excessive rain during the primary cultivation period in the first week of December, Last year, a total of 890 tonnes of onion seeds were produced in 1,711 hectares of land in Faridpur.
Not only the onion seed, the extreme weather and climate change impacted the overall agricultural production. Bangladesh, the poster child of human-induced climate change, bears the brunt of the consequences of extreme climatic events such as floods, droughts, cyclones, salinity and sea-level rise. In addition, the frequency and intensity of these extreme climatic events are shooting upward. They jeopardize households’ cereal food consumption in areas where the outbreak and landfall of these events are moderate and severe. Like cyclones and drought, floods demonstrate a high-level threat to the country’s food security depending on the frequency, magnitude, and time of occurrence. Every year, floods inundate approximately 20.5% of the entire territory.
The government of Bangladesh has taken various programmes to offset the ill effects of climate change by developing climate-smart varieties sustaining in the saline, drought, and submerging conditions. Nevertheless, climate change will have detrimental effects on all four domains of food security — availability, access, utilization, and stability.
