Coastal communities are bringing rice, vegetables and freshwater fish back to landscapes long dominated by black tiger shrimp. Blocked canals and disputed land are turning adaptation into conflict.
Beside the Kalindi River in Satkhira, Abu Bakr Siddik stands in a dry black tiger shrimp pond holding land documents. An excavator has cut a channel across the cracked bed. The local union council says it is reopening a public canal; Abu Bakr and neighbouring gher owners say the machine crossed private agricultural land their families have used for decades.
Nearby smallholders want the canal. They hope to drain rainwater and irrigate fields they are trying to bring back under rice. The gher owners need controlled access to brackish river water and an outlet when storms fill their ponds. The trench therefore divides more than land. It divides two ideas of adaptation in a coast where salt, waterlogging and failing infrastructure shape almost every livelihood.
Freshwater revival is spreading through parts of Shyamnagar and Assasuni. Rice, mustard, sunflower, vegetables, pond fish and fruit trees have returned to places that were dominated by saline aquaculture. But the reporting also finds small shrimp farmers who cannot simply switch, villages with different groundwater conditions a few hundred metres apart, and canal projects stalled by lawsuits and distrust.
The lesson is uncomfortable but useful: freshwater recovery can deliver wide social and ecological benefits, yet it will not be just if it is imposed through disputed excavation or by removing shrimp farmers’ only water route before a public alternative works.
Shrimp is weaker than its legend, but far from gone
Black tiger shrimp helped create the coastal ‘white gold’ economy. A historical FAO assessment records how shrimp culture expanded through polders and tidal waterways, often replacing or rotating with rice. Commercial growth brought foreign exchange and new investment, but it also reduced demand for agricultural labour and intensified competition over land and saline water.
Current official data contradict two easy narratives: neither an unbroken boom nor total collapse is accurate. The Department of Fisheries’ latest published statistics put shrimp and prawn farm production at about 315,000 tonnes in 2023-24. Shrimp and prawn exports that year were 19,131 tonnes worth Tk2,117.67 crore, down sharply in volume from 2021-22.
Then exports rebounded. In May 2026, BIDA and MIDA reported that shrimp earned $296.29 million in FY2024-25, rising 19 percent and accounting for about three-quarters of frozen fish and shrimp export earnings. Government and industry representatives proposed controlled indoor farming and a dedicated economic zone while acknowledging disease, weak traceability, low productivity and price volatility.
National planners are therefore trying to modernise shrimp, while some coastal communities are trying to reduce saline aquaculture. Both can be rational at the same time. The conflict emerges when export expansion, embankment safety, food production and household water security compete within the same polder without an agreed plan.
Salt crosses farm boundaries
Salinity in southwest Bangladesh has no single cause. Sea-level rise, storm surges, rainfall, upstream freshwater flow, river dynamics, land subsidence, damaged gates and embankments, and deliberate intake of brackish water all interact. The mix changes by river, season and village.
The World Bank’s coastal salinity assessment projects that climate change will increase dry-season salinity, reducing water available for irrigation and affecting rice yields. Its river-salinity analysis also includes upstream withdrawal and changing river flow. Climate change is therefore part of the explanation, but not a licence to blame every salty field on the global climate or every gher on a single farmer.
Evidence from Satkhira shows why rice growers still focus on neighbouring aquaculture. A 2020 study of 316 paddy plots in Kaliganj found higher soil salinity and lower paddy profits closer to shrimp ponds. A newer remote-sensing and farmer survey reported that aquaculture in its southwest study area nearly doubled between 1990 and 2022 as agricultural land declined.
Salt and drainage do not respect plot boundaries. That makes individual choice insufficient. A rice plot cannot remain fresh if saline water is admitted all around it. A shrimp farmer cannot protect stock if rainwater has no exit. The unit of adaptation is often the water system shared by a cluster of farms.
The coast runs on polders, gates and canals
The southwest’s low-lying settlements are enclosed by polders. Embankments keep out high tides and storm surges. Canals and sluice gates are meant to release rainwater at low tide and help manage water for agriculture. According to the World Bank’s coastal resilience programme, Bangladesh has 139 coastal polders and about 6,000 kilometres of embankments.
Inside those defences, a blocked canal can be as damaging as a weak embankment. Paddy drowns when water cannot leave. Shrimp ponds also fail when excessive rain changes water conditions or causes overflow. Pipes cut through embankments give gher owners direct river access, but authorities say they weaken protection and allow uncontrolled saltwater entry.
Bangladesh’s Climate-Smart Agriculture and Water Management Project links drainage rehabilitation with higher rice and fisheries productivity and promotes integrated rice-fish or rice-shrimp systems. That approach is more realistic than declaring one crop universally correct. The missing element in many villages is a trusted institution that decides when gates open, who maintains the canal and how competing users share risk.
Protapnagar turned green after prolonged flooding
The author visited Protapnagar union in 2021 and 2022 after Cyclone Amphan and Cyclone Yaas. Breached embankments had left villages flooded and waterlogged for long periods. Trees died, roads and buildings were damaged, and both ghers and paddy fields became unproductive.
Mohammad Abu Daud Dhali took office as union council chair in January 2022. He said embankment rebuilding, community and NGO tree planting, and a ban on bringing saline water into the polder drove the recovery. When the author returned in 2025, formerly barren areas were green, with crops and trees reappearing.
Daud’s case for freshwater was also a case for wider distribution. One large gher may support relatively few operators across many bighas. The same land under a freshwater system can produce rice, vegetables, pond fish, fruit and fodder across multiple households. Food grown on even a small plot can protect a family when markets or jobs fail.
Shrimp farmers complained that the restriction threatened their income. Their objection matters. Protapnagar demonstrates that coordinated freshwater restoration is possible after disaster; it does not prove that a blanket ban is suitable everywhere. A just transition has to account for the people whose existing crop is being displaced.
In Shinghortoli, success stops where the aquifer changes
A farmer-led transition began in Shinghortoli with about 150 bighas in 2021 and later expanded beyond 300. Rice fields now share the landscape with mustard, sunflower and vegetables. Ponds that were saline hold freshwater fish, and fruit trees are flowering again.
Al Amin Hossain said residents who had run ghers all their lives had to relearn farming. Hail, heavy rain, falling rice prices and mistakes brought losses. Yet he preferred a diverse freshwater ecosystem to years of shrimp disease and uncertain harvests.
Science can widen the options but cannot remove the water constraint. The Bangladesh Rice Research Institute develops rice for salinity and other stresses. Research on farmers’ salinity thresholds in southwest Bangladesh found that newer salt-tolerant varieties endure more than traditional Boro rice, while warning that damaging thresholds may still be reached as salinity peaks during sensitive growth stages.
Shinghortoli also reveals why one policy cannot fit a whole village. The farmers who switched are near a useful freshwater aquifer and can install pumps. Residents say the freshwater layer thins toward the east, making the same method impossible. Many small gher owners there combine a few bighas of shrimp with poultry, livestock, container vegetables, salt-tolerant fruit and leased rice land elsewhere. They are not insulated from climate or market risk.
Chiler Khal should connect these groups, but residents say its sluice gate has failed and sections of the canal have narrowed, silted or been occupied. In October 2025, authorities removed pipes through the embankment to protect it. Gher farmers said they were left without brackish-water access or dependable drainage. Months later, the pipes had returned. An unsafe private solution reappeared because the public system was still unusable.
Kaikhali’s canal battle
Kaikhali’s farmers rely heavily on surface water because local groundwater is widely described as saline. Sheikh Abdur Rahim, the union council chair during the reporting, said canals had not been properly excavated for decades. After an attempt involving the Bangladesh Agricultural Development Corporation was delayed by rain, he used local public-works provisions to start digging four canals.
Freshwater farmers supported the objective. They had lost watermelon, cucumber and other crops when rainwater remained on fields, while ponds alone could not provide enough dry-season irrigation. Rahim said one canal could support at least 100 bighas, though that was a local estimate and not a surveyed figure.
The excavator also entered land claimed by shrimp farmers. Mariam Begum said fish were lost and digging came dangerously close to her home. Abu Bakr and other landholders showed records they said proved ownership. Rahim described the alignment as public canal or khas land and said proceedings under Section 145 had stopped work on two canals.
The Climate Watch cannot decide title from competing papers. The reporting did not include a final court order or land-office survey settling the claims. Canal recovery should begin with public notice, historical and current cadastral maps, physical boundary marking and hearings for owners, tenants and affected households. Where lawful private land or crops are damaged, due process and compensation are essential.
That is not an argument for leaving canals occupied. It is an argument for restoration that can withstand legal and public scrutiny. Heavy-handed work may open a channel quickly, but it can also turn people who need drainage into determined opponents of the project.
What should count as success?
The conflict is partly sustained by the way institutions measure success. Fisheries agencies count production, export earnings, survival rates and processing capacity. Agricultural agencies count cropped area, yield and new varieties. Water agencies count kilometres of embankment, gates repaired and canals excavated. Each measure is useful, but none captures the whole livelihood system inside a polder.
A freshwater transition can raise rice production while reducing cash income for a household that depended on shrimp. A modern shrimp farm can increase output while employing fewer people or concentrating control over water. A newly excavated canal can improve drainage while damaging a home or a crop if its alignment is wrong. Declaring success from a single indicator hides those trade-offs.
The communities in this story suggest a wider scorecard. It would ask how many households can grow food, how many days of work are created, whether women and smallholders control productive assets, whether livestock have fodder, whether drinking and irrigation water remain usable, whether gates and canals drain extreme rainfall, and whether fish farmers can operate without weakening the embankment or salinising neighbouring fields.
Monitoring also needs a baseline. Before changing a water regime, agencies should record soil and water salinity, crop and aquaculture output, landholding and tenancy, household income sources, canal dimensions and the condition of gates. Follow-up data would show whether freshwater revival is genuinely restoring a landscape or simply moving loss from one group to another.
Financing must follow the same logic. A canal budget that covers excavation but not a functioning sluice gate, routine desiltation and a local operating committee can produce a short-lived improvement. Agricultural support that distributes seed without ensuring irrigation may fail in the dry season. Shrimp assistance that raises stocking density without disease surveillance, water-quality controls and emergency drainage can increase both financial and ecological risk.
The timing of assistance matters as well. Switching land from a saline gher to rice may require flushing, repeated monsoon rainfall, soil preparation and several seasons of experimentation. During that interval, a household may lose its existing income before the new system produces reliably. Transitional grants, public works, low-risk credit and guaranteed technical support can prevent adaptation from becoming another debt trap. Publishing the transition budget would also let residents see whether promised support reaches affected families before restrictions begin.
This does not require choosing between food security and exports. It requires recognising that national shrimp strategy and local freshwater planning operate at different scales. The current government shrimp roadmap emphasises controlled production, laboratories, traceability and biosecurity. If implemented carefully, those investments could concentrate intensive export production in suitable, regulated settings while reducing pressure to push saline water through every mixed-farming village.
Freshwater revival needs rules, not only excavation
The policy foundation already exists. The Bangladesh Delta Plan 2100 treats the southwest as a hotspot where salinity, waterlogging, freshwater, ecosystems and livelihoods must be managed together. WARPO’s local integrated water-management guidelines are intended to bring coordination down to district, upazila and union levels. The Bangladesh Water Act 2013 and Water Rules 2018 provide the legal framework.
Implementation should start with a verified canal inventory. Authorities need to compare historical maps and current records, survey boundaries, identify encroachment and publish the result. Canal excavation, sluice repair and embankment protection should then be designed as one drainage network rather than disconnected projects.
Each water unit also needs a seasonal operating agreement. It should state whether and when brackish water may enter, how rainfall will be drained, who controls gates, what water quality will be monitored and how complaints will be resolved. Women landholders, tenant farmers, landless labourers, fish farmers, rice growers and livestock keepers all need representation because output statistics alone do not reveal who benefits.
Support must be practical on both sides. Freshwater farmers need suitable seed, irrigation, drainage, extension and market access. Shrimp farmers need disease control, safe post-larvae, traceability and production systems that reduce environmental spillovers. Those asked to switch need a staged livelihood plan rather than an abrupt period in which neither rice nor shrimp is possible.
Satkhira’s freshwater revival is one of the coast’s most promising adaptation stories precisely because it is not a miracle. It is the result of difficult collective choices about water. Protapnagar shows how quickly a landscape can recover when saline intake is controlled. Shinghortoli shows how geology and broken infrastructure limit replication. Kaikhali shows how a canal meant to serve the public can become unjust if land decisions are opaque.
At the Kalindi, Abu Bakr’s papers and his neighbours’ demand for rice belong to the same climate story. One side fears losing an established livelihood; the other fears that without freshwater, the village cannot restore food and ecological security. The answer is neither permanent paralysis nor excavation by force. It is a water system that works, a land process people can challenge and a transition in which no group is left with an empty pond and no crop to replace it.
This story is published as part of the CPRD–TCW Reporting Fellowship 2025
