Vegetable Production in Sack: an Alternative Approach to Building Urban Agriculture

Bangladesh is one of the countries vulnerable because of recent climate change. A country needs around 25% of its land to be covered by forest to maintain its ecological balance, but here the percentage is much less. Urban dwellers have hardly seen any greenery around them and every inch of land is occupied by various types of infrastructure. The solution lies in planting as many trees as possible, and the only place to do that seems to be on the rooftop or balcony and in slum areas. Vegetable production by the sack gardening method is an effective and innovative technology in Bangladesh. It has received positive attention from urban household communities. It is an alternative vegetable garden for utilizing small land areas or space. Individual families are growing many varieties of vegetables with minimum expenditure. After receiving the exciting research findings, the technology has increasingly been adopted among the urban people of some city areas such as Dhaka (capital and central), Sylhet (north-eastern) and Brahmanbaria districts (east-central) of Bangladesh in 2010-2011. It has been observed that urban people including slum dwellers have been showing keen interest in this method. Urban households are now able to grow and cook their own vegetables and have more diversity in their daily diet by growing highly nutritional products. The technology is possible for adoption and replication in other city areas both at home and abroad.