1 m³ storage space for the harvest of a farming family in Bangladesh

In Bangladesh, the most densely populated country in the world, almost 70% of the 166 million inhabitants still live as smallholder farmers in rural areas (Bureau of Statistics, 2022). However, most smallholder families are landless because land ownership is extremely unequally distributed: 80% of the land belongs to 10% of the population (Sarker et al. 2021), a relic of the British colonial era, when a minority received large estates and ruled over the landless majority. To this day, smallholder farmers lease the land on credit. But even then, their harvest does not belong to them: Due to the lack of their own storage space, they are forced to sell their agricultural products to large landowners with appropriate storage facilities immediately after the harvest, when the price is at its lowest. Often they cannot even keep the amount they would need to feed their own families. So after a few weeks they practically have to buy their own rice again on the market at much higher prices. The profits that small farmers can generate in this system of extreme dependence on large landowners and businessmen with capital barely cover the costs of production. According to the Bangladesh IPC Chronic Food Insecurity Report (June 2022), 21% of the population is chronically hungry, or in other words: almost 35 million people are permanently undernourished - precisely those whose work ensures the supply of the population.