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people in this village are now earning more because of improved agricultural practices, and villagers from surrounding towns and even distant villages travel regularly to this community to learn how to achieve the same results.
Because people in Gaidghat in the district of Jessore are earning more, their social status has risen. They formerly were addressed using the more familiar “tui,” which is used to speak to children or someone of lower rank, but are now addressed with the term “apni,” reserved for someone of higher status.
The women, who can complete about 300 grafts a day each, use the money they earn to purchase milk to improve their children’s diet and to buy them clothing and school-related necessities such as books, notebooks, and pens.
The eggplant grafting program is part of a larger program under the Integrated Pest Management Collaborative Research Support Program (IPM CRSP), supported by funds from the U.S. Agency for International Development. The IPM CRSP, managed by Virginia Tech’s Office of International Research, Education, and Development, has been addressing problems in developing countries around the world since 1993. In Bangladesh, Virginia Tech has partnered with scientists at Pennsylvania State University and Ohio State University since 1998. The eggplant grafting program was introduced in Jessore, known as the “vegetable basket” of the country, in 2003.
The technological impact of an improvement in agriculture is hard for Americans to grasp, since so few of us are directly involved in agriculture—two percent, by some estimates. In Bangladesh, two-thirds of the population is employed in the agricultural sector. The main crops are rice, wheat, sugar cane, jute, spices, and vegetables, of which there are more than 90 kinds. The fertile soils and warm climate are conducive to cultivating vegetables, which grow there year-round. For eggplant, Bangladesh is ideal, as the plant requires lots of water, hot weather, and rich, sandy soil.
Eggplant grafting was first developed by The World Vegetable Center in Taiwan in the early 1990s. By 1997, scientists there had begun grafting eggplant scions (the cut-off shoots) onto bacterial wilt resistant rootstock. They learned that one variety, EG 203, not only resists bacterial wilt, it also shows resistance to other kinds of wilt, certain worms, and flooding. The last quality has proven extremely valuable in Bangladesh, where one-third of the country floods annually.
Eggplant is a staple crop in Bangladesh, not just the big, glossy, purple vegetable we see in our grocery stores. There are 100 traditional varieties of eggplant in Bangladesh, and 35 to 40 of them are commonly grown: long, short, purple, gray, white, yellowish, striped. The vegetable, technically a fruit—a berry, no less—is native to South Asia. In fact, its scientific species name, Melongena, comes from the Sanskrit vatin gana — “the plant that cures the wind” — in other words, the anti-flatulence vegetable!
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