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This is the first in a series of 7 posts from Bangladesh and India.

Saturday, 01 November 2008

Bangladesh is a land of rivers. I can see that from my airplane window as we flying into Dhaka. The waters flow into the Bay of Bengal, along seemingly orderly channels. The riverbanks and small low-lying islands are planted to rice.

Upon landing our group (scientists, breeders, writers and photographers) make our way through the crowded parking lot to find our limousine. The cars line up bumper to bumper; the drivers blowing their horns every few seconds to encourage the beggars, mostly young barefooted boys, to move aside. One boy sleeps soundly on the pavement.

One hundred and fifty million people live in Bangladesh, in a geographic area the size of Wisconsin.

After checking into hotel Laurel (certainly nothing like the Mayflower hotel in Washington DC where my husband I stayed last week), we squeeze back into the vehicles and drive to our first meeting at Dhaka University.

Built in 1921 by the British, Dhaka University is the main research and teaching center in the country. The edges of the dirty, worn stairs are hand painted with colorful flowers. I wonder if enthusiastic students did the work on a day where they had some spare time, perhaps during a power outage that are frequent here.

Our host, and the leader of the laboratory, Zeba I. Seraj, introduces us to her 10 students who have waited until late in the day (our plane was delayed for 2 hours) to meet us. We walk through the hallways where the AC whirrs loudly in an attempt to cool the building. Because the outside air moves in through gaps in the wall, it is still hot.

The room where we meet the students is beautiful; every foot of wall is covered with 100-year old wooden cabinets filled with biology books and journals. I imagine that this room is filled with young hardworking students during the day anxious to learn what is before them and perhaps relieved to escape the hot ill-equipped labs for a short while.

Zeba tells us that salinity is a problem for rice farmers here. Not only is the sea water rising, but fresh water supplies are under pressure partly because farmers are pumping more every year and also because Bangladesh is downstream from India, who gets first dibs on the fresh water through a network of dams. The result is that every year the saline lands encroach north, hurting rice yields, a serious problem here where the average Bengali receives 2/3 of their diet from rice. And then there are floods that arrive unpredictably, sometimes wiping out the entire crop.

Zeba and her students are working to develop salt tolerant rice. They have had success in identifying a chromosomal regions from local landraces that confer salt tolerance to the rice. They are now trying to introduce those regions into higher-yielding varieties. They have also had some success with a genetic engineering approach. She shows us a dramatic picture of their newly developed transgenic lines thriving under high salt concentrations that kill the conventional variety. Zeba’s group is now testing to see how the transgenic lines yield under normal growing conditions.