Farmers Adaptation Strategies to Adverse Impacts of Drought on Agriculture of the Central Barind Tract of Bangladesh: An Empirical Study

Abstract

Drought is a reoccurring phenomenon which is considered as one of the topmost slow-onset disasters in the central Barind Tract of northwestern Bangladesh. Due to the consequences of drought, agriculture of this area is highly impacted as well as the farmers fall in multidimensional livelihoods disruption. The objective of the paper is to investigate the existing adaptive measures practicing by farmers to combat adverse impacts of agricultural drought in two representative drought-prone locations of Rajshahi District of Bangladesh. The present study is mainly based on semi-structured household questionnaire survey. Eventually, the survey was conducted in 2019 among 303 households out of 1421 by using Kothari (2004) sampling formula considering 95% significance level and samples are determined through simple random sampling. Both descriptive and inferential statistics are used to analyze the adoption options of the cultivators of the study areas from geographical perspectives. It is found that most of the farmers adopted several measures rely on their traditional knowledge and experiences, participation in community trainings as well as receiving the facilities and support from different GOs and NGOs. Farmers are cultivating drought tolerant crop varieties, adopting rainwater harvesting, intercropping with rice, temporally changing occupation, using fertilizer and composting to accelerate crop production rate, changing irrigation system, participating in agro-training for coping with modern technologies, seeking to draw the compensation from GOs and microcredit of NGOs etc. to minimize drought impacts. However, the findings of present study are expected to provide useful guidelines to policy makers for facilitating farmers in sustaining their livelihoods against adverse impacts of agricultural drought in Barind Tract of Bangladesh.