Life in a shrimp zone: aqua- and other cultures of Bangladesh's coastal landscape

Abstract

This essay questions the possibilities of food sovereignty for producing a radical egalitarian politics. Specifically, it explores the class-differentiated implications of food sovereignty in a zone of ecological crisis – Bangladesh's coastal Khulna district. Much land in this deltaic zone that had previously been employed for various forms of peasant production has been transformed by the introduction of brackish-water shrimp aquaculture. This has, in turn, caused massive depeasantization and ecological crisis throughout the region. Through an examination of two markedly different polders (embanked islands) – one which has been overrun by shrimp production and one that has resisted it – we ask how coastal communities and their members have variously negotiated their rapidly changing ecologies and food systems based on their relative class position and access to land. We highlight the multiple meanings that peasants from different classes ascribe not just to shrimp, but also to broader questions of adaptation, community and life in uncertain terrains. We show that while food sovereignty in non-shrimp areas has averted the depeasantization affecting shrimp areas, it has not necessarily led to greater equality in agrarian class relations. To achieve such ends, we suggest that a broader conception of agrarian sovereignty provides a critical and necessary corollary to self-determination in agricultural production.

Keywords:

• food sovereignty
• development
• displacement
• dispossession
• agrarian sovereignty
• aquaculture
• shrimp
• Bangladesh

Our deepest thanks to the community researchers in Khulna for their collegiality and enthusiasm in conducting this research. Special thanks also to David Bruer at Inter Pares and the Department of Foreign Affairs, Trade and Development Canada, as well as the Atkinson Center for a Sustainable Future-Oxfam Rural Resilience Project at Cornell, for making this project possible. Thanks also to Khushi Kabir for her vision in planning and making the project happen, and to the Nijera Kori staff for their partnership in executing the research. Thanks in particular to Rezanur ‘Rose’ Rahman, from whom we have learned a great deal, and whose passion for the movement is a constant inspiration. Earlier drafts of this essay were presented in Fall 2013 at the Yale Agrarian Studies conference on Food Sovereignty and at the workshop, ‘Bangladesh: contested pasts, competing futures’ at the University of Texas, Austin. We thank these audiences for their generous feedback and engagement. We thank Erin Lentz, Townsend Middleton and David Rojas for their helpful comments on earlier drafts.

Notes

¹Our claim, of course, is not that class is the only category of differentiation that matters amongst the peasantry. Rather, we argue that it is one critical dimension in understanding the vagaries and differential impacts of food sovereignty and its lack in rural communities in Bangladesh.

²On the implications of this argument to the broader debate over peasant differentiation and the agrarian question of the twenty-first century, we concur with McMichael that ‘to represent the prospects of the peasantry solely through the lens of the capital relation is problematic because it reproduces a telos regarding the transience of peasantries, and tends to foreclose possibility of campesino resistances to capitalism’ (2006, 412). We thus retain the distinction between absolute depeasantization (through which rural dwellers are forced to leave rural communities entirely), and transitions of production relations within rural communities, which may nevertheless be classified as ‘proletarianization’ (Harriss 1987; Bernstein 2004, 2006).

³Our argument here doesn't seek to endorse Scott's reading of moral economy over others, which are more focused on micropolitics and microdifferentiation within and across communities. Rather, we are interested in the subsistence ethic because it highlights the contrast between existence and non-existence of individuals, families and communities in peasant agriculture.

⁴Which is not to say that Scott's work is not attentive to community politics and relations vis-à-vis subsistence. Rather, we are suggesting that the notion of food sovereignty generalizes and reframes the concept of a subsistence ethic at a community scale. As we show here, this is particularly marked and critical in the context of broad-based ecological crisis.

⁵For a more detailed discussion, see Cons and Paprocki (2010).

⁶The CEP formally ran from 1961 to 1979. However, it is important to note that this project represented neither the beginning nor the end of embanking projects in the region. Other projects involved in embankment construction in Khulna include the Delta Development Project, which operated in Khulna during the 1980s and, most recently, the ongoing Asian Development Bank-funded Coastal Rehabilitation Project. As Sur (2010) notes, the embankments in Polder 22 were constructed by the Bangladesh Water Development Board.

⁷This project was one in a long line of large-scale institutional projects designed to re-engineer the deltaic landscape that is now Bangladesh, shaped by various political agendas (Boyce 1990; Haque and Zaman 1993; Lewis 2010).

⁸A process that may contribute to the inegalitarian politics we explore below.

⁹More than 13,000 of whom live in Paikgacha town, a booming market town largely organized around shrimp exports.

¹⁰Bagda is the primary form of shrimp production in Polder 23. Bagda are grown in brackish water.

¹¹For more on microcredit indebtedness in contemporary Bangladesh, see Cons and Paprocki (2010) and Karim (2011).

¹²On the transformation of social and ecological relations through the expansion of industrial agriculture, see Wittman (2009).

¹³Common property regimes in Bangladesh, though theoretically regulated by the country's constitution, are governed in practice through local negotiation, patronage relations and the persistent agitation of those who, from radically different positions of power, seek to lay claims to resources. They are also, importantly, deeply circumscribed by the particular ecology of the region, characterized by transient alluvial deposits (chars) which cause the constant formation and erosion of land, at once creating and curtailing opportunities for claims-making. Thus, the ability of landless people to gain access to khas lands is largely dependent on their ability to mobilize both individually and collectively. In Polder 22, landless collectives (including both members and non-members of Nijera Kori) have successfully secured access to multiple tracts of khas land which is collectively cultivated by a group of 26 members for a period of approximately 9 months of each year. In addition to this, landless collectives work voluntarily to build and maintain modest embankments that protect an additional ring of khas land around the polder. Seasonal cultivation and casual livestock grazing on this land provides a source of livelihood to many of the community's marginalized residents, and also provides an additional layer of protection to all residents in the polder from storm surges and dangerous flooding.

¹⁴It is worth noting that there are remarkable similarities between food sovereignty – as described by Scott's subsistence ethic – and the debate over sovereignty opened by Agamben's Homo sacer (1998). Agamben's argument famously identifies those excluded by the ‘sovereign exception’ as being cast from bios – humanity defined as inclusion in political community – into zoe – humanity defined only as biology, or ‘bare life’. This framework and the debate over sovereignty that it has engendered have been, by and large, overlooked in the literature on food sovereignty. A full examination of those linkages is beyond the scope of this paper. However, there are interesting resonances between food sovereignty and discussions of humanitarianism over the meaning of humanitarian sovereignty and the purpose of exercising that sovereign power. Authors such as Ticktin (2006) and Agier (2011) have critiqued the nature of humanitarian sovereignty as reducing the conception of humanitarian aid to one of bare life – mere survival. Others have reframed this critique, arguing that the purpose of humanitarian intervention is and should be defined by an imperative towards bare life: to keeping people alive and getting out of the way so that those affected by humanitarian catastrophe can author their own forms of community and politics (Weizman 2012). The question of whether bare life can serve as an effective platform for political intervention, advocacy or activism in the context of peasant politics is one that we would suggest is latent, yet crucial in the food sovereignty debate.

¹⁵As documented by Adnan (2013) in Bangladesh's Noakhali district, Nijera Kori has mobilized on behalf of the rights of the landless to khas lands with varying degrees of success. In Noakhali, landless groups gained the rights to collectively cultivate khas lands through local campaigning and squatting on newly formed char lands, as well as the support of national-level advocacy groups. These campaigns were fraught with the obstacles of multiple and competing regimes of power, requiring complex and often competing strategies on the part of local stakeholders. Thus, in Khulna, as in Noakhali, the process of reimagining agrarian futures entails challenging both old and new power structures which threaten the ability of landless peoples to survive and thrive.

Additional information

Kasia Paprocki is a PhD candidate in Development Sociology at Cornell University. Her research focuses on development, agrarian dispossession and resistance in rural Bangladesh.

Jason Cons is a Research Assistant Professor in the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas, Austin. His research focuses on the India-Bangladesh border and on agrarian change in rural Bangladesh. Email: [email protected]