Big Ideas: “How to grow food in land people think is useless”, With Nazmul Islam Chowdhury

My “Big Idea”, was that perhaps a food crop could be grown on barren sandbars. Though there was opposition to this from my immediate superior, I fought for it, and then other experts validated it. At the end of the day, other crops than pumpkins are being grown, and the farmers are even able to increase their livelihoods by selling some of what they make. We are now working to establish a legal framework so this idea is sustainable into the future. Also, there are many other countries and areas of countries that are impacted by monsoon rains. This is an exportable idea.

As a part of my series about “Big Ideas That Might Change The World In The Next Few Years” I had the pleasure of interviewing Nazmul Islam Chowdhury, an official with the NGO Practical Action in Bangladesh. For 27 years, Chowdhury has worked with the international agency Practical Action. During the course of his work, he came upon an innovative way to grow crops on sandbars left after Bangladesh’s monsoon flooding. It became known as “Pumpkins Against Poverty” and provided poor farmers an essential crop on land that previously was thought useless. This not only provided an important food source but also gave farmers, mostly women, the ability to pay for school for their children with money left from what was not sold at market and even to acquire modest transportation, such as a motorbike. Chowdhury is an agriculture expert with an emphasis on entrepreneurship development, disaster risk reduction, and climate change issues. He has been active in food security, extreme poverty, and gender inequality areas. Most recently he has been working on the Rohingya refugee crisis in Bangladesh. Chowdhury has a Masters in Agricultural science in Fisheries Biology and Limnology, from Bangladesh Agricultural University, a Bachelor of Arts, from Rajshahi University, Diploma in Poverty Focus on monitoring and evaluation from East Anglia…