Indigenous knowledge in development: An experience from farmer community in a Bangladesh village

Abstract

The present study is about the role of indigenous knowledge (IK) in development; more specifically in the agriculture sector, with the aim of exploring the potential of the farmers’ dependency on indigenous knowledge in soil conservation, land management, seed preparation and preservation, crop rotation and agro-forestry towards developing a sustainable rural livelihood. Interest in a ‘bottom-up’ approach that largely emphasizes indigenous knowledge has been growing rapidly worldwide due to its important role for sustainable agriculture. Sustainable development and indigenous knowledge are meaningfully related, as IK develops through experience sharing and is normally passed on by oral expressions and preserved by community members through the lifetime practice of this knowledge. As a body of knowledge, it is associated with long term occupancy of a certain place, which represents the sum of the experience and knowledge of a given social group and forms the basis of decision making. However, IK has largely been marginalized and neglected due to ignorance, politics and the dominant modernizing process of agriculture in rural Bangladesh, although farmers still use indigenous knowledge in agriculture to ensure sustainable and eco-friendly agricultural production, in order to protect the land’s fertility and maximize the utility of agricultural land. Farmers in this study believe that the use of modern agricultural technology is unavoidable to survive the demands of the market economy; nonetheless, to ensure sustainable agricultural development, there is no better alternative than local farming technology which is very well known, cheaper, available, natural and eco-friendly. Thus, there is an urgent need for further studies to discover, develop and maximize the benefits of indigenous knowledge that may appear small, but could make a big difference to people’s spirits, pride and nationhood. In the study village, it was observed that farmers largely use indigenous knowledge to preserve crop variety, seed technology and develop networks of seed exchange, as well as indigenous methods of sowing seeds and indigenous mixed cropping strategies. Participant farmers were aware of biodiversity conservation and believed that using indigenous knowledge in agriculture is very constructive for biodiversity conservation. In the same time, they use modern technology, hybrid seeds and chemical fertilizers. However, they always feel that use of chemical fertilizers and hybrid seeds damage their land in the long term. For this reason they try to combine Indigenous Knowledge and Modern Knowledge.