Despite having a huge demand for dried fish, the production of fish has decreased alarmingly at Chalanbeel nowadays leaving more than 500 dried-fish-producing villages and thousands of fishermen dependent on dried-fish processing and production are in distress.
It is learnt, once the Chalanbeel fishermen used to catch fish from various beels, ponds and water bodies and sold those in local markets.
Excess unsold fishes were dried at various villages and those were sold throughout the country and even abroad. The processing of dried fish needed a tedious job. At first, housewives of villages used to cut and clean those and were sorted according to species. Then those were kept on a bamboo-made ‘Chatal’ for drying. People are needed to watch around the clock to save those fishes from the attack of birds, dogs or any other predators.
It requires about 4 to 5 months to process dried fish for marketing. Once, the fishermen used to earn millions of taka from selling these dried fish but the scarcity of fish nowadays has forced many fishermen to abandon their ancestral profession.
Fishermen of the Chalanbeel villages said, there are many reasons for the scarcity of fish in the Chalanbeel. Of those, the absence of water round the year is the main one. They said, once the Chalanbeel held water round the year as more than fifty rivers and tributaries crisscrossed the beel. But, nowadays, all those rivers are dried up and instead of fish, paddy is cultivated at the dried river beds of Chalanbeels.
Use of excessive chemical fertilizers and pesticides during the dry season and catching of fish-fry and mother fish are also reasons for destroying fish resources of the Chalanbeel.
Rahima, Sumita and Salam of Panihar village under Singra Upazila informed, even two-decade ago, the villagers of Chalanbeel used to catch huge fishes of different species and dry those to sell to the Mahajons (Lenders) and Farias, who rushed to the beel villages from various parts of the country to purchase dried fish. They informed, sweet water dried fishes had a special demand from the people of home and abroad. But, now the rivers and beels being dried up, the beel people themselves are suffering from want of fish.
Jamal Hossain, a dried fish trader in the Chalanbeel area said, now the market price of dried fish is almost the half of its production cost.
So, the fishermen were incurring a huge loss in producing and selling of dried fish in the Chalanbeel areas. He also said some syndicate gangs were controlling the dried fish trade in Chalanbeel areas. As a result, poor fishermen, small investors and traders are not being able to compete with those syndicates.
Hundreds of dried fish traders of Bhangura, Faridpur, Chatmohor, Boraigram, Gurudaspur, Tarash, Raiganj, Ullapara and Singra upazilas are now worried about their future. They demanded of the government to take measures against the syndicate members, to take initiative to retain features of Chalanbeel and to save the dried fish traders and their ancestral profession.
