Marginal and landless sharecroppers of the district are facing difficulty in cultivation and uphold their basic necessities as the landowners and irrigation service providers often exploit them.
The sharecroppers, who are tenant farmers giving a part of their produce as rent, accumulates a living by cultivating different crops, mainly paddy, in different seasons but land owners who rent their land to the farmers, along with the irrigation service providers, take away a huge chunk from the crops as rent against the land.
In a 0.4 hectare of land, a sharecropper produces an estimated 70maund of paddy but at least 60% of the produce has to be given to the land owners to meet their demands. However, in exceptional cases, the owners share half the cost of seeds and fertilisers.
Expressing their sufferings, some farmers – Ayub Ali, Farid Miah and Ambar Ali, of nearby villages of the district’s sadar upazila said the cost of a shallow irrigation machine is around Tk32,000 to Tk35,000 which is too expensive for them to buy. They have to spend a substantial amount of money to hire the shallow machines and buy pesticides, including inputs and other materials needed, but they pay the landowners through their produces.
“We can only keep a little portion of our produce after paying the shares of the owners and meeting the demands of the irrigation service providers.”
Some sharecroppers also blamed the natural calamities for their distress as storms, drought and seasonal floods often shatter their hopes of good harvest making it difficult to repay the debts.
According to the locals, the rise in population is another addition to the farmers existing problems since it is now difficult to find cultivable lands. A fertile land, which produces at least two crops in a year has high demands among the farmers and are often occupied.
Regarding such events, a sharecropper said: “The yields from the field fail to meet our cereal demand the whole year so we eventually have to do other jobs in order to buy our necessities.”
He said the debts usually keep most of the sharecroppers under pressure and since they do not have direct access to bank loans, they are compelled to take loans from moneylenders at exorbitant interest rates. Once in the clutches of moneylenders, it is difficult to come out.
Moreover, the farmer also said they [sharecroppers] have to please different influential people at points if they want to receive a bank loan. Adding to that, the banks also compel them to take a huge amount of agriculture loan.
However, amid all problems, the farmers were happy to mention that the season’s IRRI-Boro production is very decent. The production of paddy exceeded that of other seasons and according to them some 55,500hectares of land have been brought under IRRI-Boro production, estimating 117,000tonnes of produce this year.
