The inscription of the Sundarbans in Bangladesh as a UNESCO World Heritage Site on 7 December 1997 is a manifestation of the importance of the area’s unique ecosystem. The Sundarbans Reserve Forest (SRF), located in the south-west of Bangladesh between the river Baleswar in the East and the Harinbanga in the West, adjoining to the Bay of Bengal, is home to one of the largest mangrove forests in the world, with a rich diversity of both terrestrial and aquatic flora and fauna. The Sundarbans is not only ecologically important: millions of people also rely on the Sundarban Delta for their livelihood, whether it be for timber, sustenance fishing, or gathering. The site also acts as a shelter belt to protect the people from weather extremes. Shrimp farming became an attractive option to produce easy money in the early 1980s, and since then thousands of hectares of the Sundarbans have been converted into shrimp ponds. Because of this, the forest has been decimated: large tracts of forests were converted into areas suitable for shrimp farming, fishermen produce a large amount of by-catch, and there has been an increase in saline intrusion as well as flooding vulnerability due to the removal of mangroves.
Contributed by Sara Stotter
Course: Global Environmental History
Instructor: Andrew Stuhl, Ph.D.
Bucknell University Lewisburg, US
- Adnan, Shapan. “Land grabs and primitive accumulation in deltaic Bangladesh: interactions between neoliberal globalization, state interventions, power relations and peasant resistance.” Journal of Peasant Studies 40, no. 1 (2013): 87-128.
- Guhathakurta, Meghna. “Poverty, Gender, and Shrimps.” In The Bangladesh Reader: History, Culture, Politics, edited by Meghna Guhathakurta, and Willem van Schendel, 457-461. Durham: Duke University Press, 2013.