Fostering the health-nutrition-ecology nexus: organic farming practices and household resilience in rural Bangladesh

• Applicant: Dr. Judith Bopp
• Subject Area: Human Geography
• Term: since 2022
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 517922697

In Bangladesh, many smallholder households are susceptible to multiple, overlapping crises, especially in settings of high exposure to climatic risks, therefore little resilient towards social-ecological changes. In the case study area in Mymensingh and Sherpur district, Bangladesh, smallholders increasingly deal with climate change-induced rainfall variability, monsoonal floods and droughts depending on their location, coming along with socio-structural inequalities and overstressed natural resources. Moreover, crises related to food system instabilities and health continue to affect these regions, reinforced during the global Covid-19 pandemic. This overlap of multiple crises calls for addressing dynamically interrelated factors that make up vulnerable households’ resilience and the mutual causalities within social-ecological systems together. I argue, approaches that examine the relationships between ecological environments, human health and nutrition, as enacted within agricultural settings, are of particular importance. However, these links are as yet underexplored. Studies indicate that organic farming can be an opportunity for smallholders to adapt to ecological challenges, improve livelihood and personal health, and regenerate soils. By developing a synthesis of theory on household resilience and interdisciplinary perspectives on health, this study employs a mixed methods approach to investigate the potential of organic farming practices to strengthen smallholder household resilience in Mymensingh and Sherpur district, Bangladesh, in face of overlapping crises. Specific focus will be on the factors health, nutrition and ecology, interrelations between these, and their role in household resilience. Bridging these two strands of scholarship helps a) capture households’ agency to realise opportunities conducive to their well-being by integrating objective and subjective resilience indicators, and b) understand health (physical, mental, social) as a potential product of human-nature interaction that is biophysical, biotic and cultural. The study draws on 12 months of fieldwork with qualitative interviews, mind maps, long-term (participant) observation, participatory stakeholder workshops and focus group discussions, combined with a quantitative household survey including health and nutrition indicators, and farm measurements. The triangulative approach will help reveal the links between natural resource use and the human health and well-being perspective, and conceptualise health-nutrition-ecology interrelations. The study will be novel contribution to transdisciplinary agriculturally oriented geographical research. It aims at deriving a conceptual model of the health-nutrition-ecology nexus potentially applicable to research concerned with smallholder household resilience and rural transformation in other global regions.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants