FARMERS had begun to thresh their paddy in Nachol by mid-May. The harvest, they said was good and the dry weather had in fact been helpful for the boro paddy. But the dry midday heat was stifling and unlike the humid weather typical of most of the other areas of Bangladesh in general. The dry weather had persisted for long as many a farmer agreed. ‘The land is all hard now and without a few days of rain we will not be able to plant anyway,’ says Naresh Mardi, member of an ethnic minority group. He adds laughingly, ‘And if it rained the boro harvest might not have been this good. Either way it will be bad. But now that we have cut the paddy from the fields, we will be hoping for some rain soon.’

   Naresh does not own much land except for his homestead, which he says is quite large for a sharecropper like him. ‘But when I rent out land, the burden and worry is much more than it would have been if I had some of my own. Since I have to give up half the crop to the owner, I must get whatever I can from the 100 decimals of land I rented out this season.’

   More often than not the boro season is the only time when crops may be grown, although with artificial irrigation, since there is little chance of storms or really inclement weather affecting the crops. ‘But this year the winter was a little erratic and recently we have had really mild winters, which affects wheat to some extent, but not so much paddy.’ Potatoes, Naresh said were badly damaged due to a few bouts of rain during the winter. ‘They were heavily damaged and whatever potatoes some of them got from the field, tasted horrible.’

   The heat was getting to him and he sat down under the shade of a looming bamboo bush, brushing husks off his sweat drenched t-shirt. ‘It would be a little cooler if the rains had come,’ he says looking up at the clear skies where there was not a hint of cloud.

ZONE
   High Barind Tract
   
   CHANGES
   * Changes in rainfall pattern (increased in monsoon and decreased in winter)
   * Increased temperatures in monsoon and winter
   * Less moisture and increased evaporation
   * Humidity
   
   POTENTIAL IMPACTS
   * Drought
   * Heat waves