Principios para lograr estimular el pensamiento creativo

Discussions with the women about how they can sustain livelihoods when agricultural production is stopped by flood waters revealed that women as well as men often go outside the district, even as far as Dhaka, seeking work; some of them never return. However, paid work is only one consideration in thinking about how the women support their households during and after prolonged flooding. About 44 per cent of the survey respondents said that some members of their family had left the district in search of paid work and all said they know of people who had done so. There are both pull and push factors at work here. Push factors include the fact that people who rely on subsistence farming cannot survive long floods or they end up owing too much to local moneylenders and have to sell all their assets to escape the debt. The biggest pull factor has been the growing garment industry in and around Dhaka, which can provide employment for many and women in particular. Although the garment industry offers paid employment for a large number of poor women, the rates of pay are low and the conditions

Page | 91 are frequently difficult and dangerous so this “escape” from poverty can be an illusion. There are, of course, some villagers, mainly men, with enough education secure better paid jobs in Dhaka, but interviews suggested that they mostly end up in low-paid jobs. Work in the Middle East is another pull factor and villagers hear of high rates of pay in Middle Eastern, in particular in the construction industry. During my fieldwork in the villages, I encountered around 50 people who had been to the Middle East to find work. Some of them were able to send money back home while they worked in various Middle Eastern countries. However, many of them told me that they were cheated by fake migration agents after they sold assets to travel abroad. They said they were left in an even worse situation because of this.

As discussed already, women undertake many forms of work in and around their homes; including livestock rearing, vegetable growing, paddy husking, making handicrafts and running very small businesses. The expansion of microfinance lending targeted to women in recent years has increased their involvement in running small enterprises, whether that be within enterprises run by their husbands or by themselves. In addition, many of the women in the study area villages also worked alongside their husbands in cultivating their own fields. Working on farms of other people, however, is still the main source of paid labour but there is less need for manual labour with the increasing use of farm machinery. Women told me that they more often work on larger farms with large fields and they work in bigger groups and are often paid in kind (i.e. vegetables) as much as cash.

Table 4.6: Survey result: Daily wages earned by male and female agricultural labourers

Daily Wage Earned by Male and Female Agricultural Labours

Sex Daily Wage without Meal Daily Wage with 2 Meals

Male 80 50

Female 50 20

The bigger farms produce a greater rotation of crop types and the fields are rarely left fallow. This means that the work is spread more evenly across the year, but the total wages are less. In some cases, poor families have tried to make up for lost wages by increasing the number and size of the livestock they maintain and some also supplement the household income by driving rented rickshaws or by buying a rickshaw and hiring it out to other drivers. The rather complicated story of what people do to maintain family incomes and how these are disrupted by big floods was captured well in the account given by Nazma Begum from Dhakhin Shilai who said:

I was destitute, and my family had no land. Along with my family I came here in this char to live. My husband was a day labourer. My husband started out driving a rented rickshaw, and I became a seasonal agricultural labourer. I used to pick potatoes and get some money from that. I saved some money and bought a goat. The goat gave birth to two calves. After some time, I sold one for 1000 taka. With the money, I bought another goat which I reared. Once it began to have calves of its own, we were able to

Page | 92 start selling milk to our neighbours. Later on my husband sold the milk at the local market. This gave us the funds to buy a rickshaw for my husband. With the money, I earn from selling milk and my husband from pulling the rickshaw we became able to feed our family three times a day. We don’t have to buy food for cows as the grass is free. But during the last flood when the entire village was under water, and my husband couldn’t pull the rickshaw, we had no food for the cow. We had to sell the cow to provide food for the family

Another woman, Shamsunnesa, said:

I grow vegetables in my homestead such as begun, lau (gourd), cucumbers and seasonal vegetables. My family doesn’t need to buy vegetables, and I sell the extra in the local market. I work in the vegetable field, weeding and tying up the vegetables. Now vegetables have become so profitable, all family members, my husband as well as our children, work in the field. I work only on our own field, but there are many women in the area who work for wages in other people’s fields. But life was not the same during the last flood as my vegetable garden was destroyed by flood water. I had to sell chickens and vegetables at low prices, and we were struggling to provide food for the family members.

Because flooding is almost an annual event in this area people have learnt how to survive minor floods, but major and prolonged flooding is another story altogether.