Paper submitted for ICARUS – IV: Theme 2 – Climate and livelihoods of the poor May 7 – 9, 2015, University of Illinois, USA Livelihood strategies across socio-economic groups in changing farming systems: Insights from salinity prone south-western coastal Bangladesh Sonia Ferdous Hoque, PhD Candidate,
[email protected] Claire Quinn, Associate Professor,
[email protected] Sustainability Research Institute, School of Earth and Environment, University of Leeds, UK Date of submission: 10 April, 2015 Abstract In south-western Bangladesh, the combined effects of climatic shocks and stresses, that is, salinity and cyclones, and anthropogenic resource degradation, arising from shift towards brackish water shrimp cultivation, have resulted in a ‘double vulnerability’ context. However, even within the same context, differential resource endowments cause households of different socio-economic categories to adopt different livelihood strategies. This paper uses evidence from two coastal villages to illustrate how households manage their constraints and opportunities to gain optimum livelihood outcomes. In the first village, where protests by local farmers have stopped shrimp farming since 2008, small and medium farmers are trying to diversify their livelihoods through freshwater prawn-fish-crop integration, while some large landowners favouring the quick cash incomes from extensive shrimp cultivation are planning to shift towards intensive methods. In the second village, where decades of dry season shrimp cultivation has forced farmers to replace