Assessing the livelihood status of fishermen at Sunamganj district in Bangladesh

Fish is considered as one of the most essential food items that provide proteins to build our body throughout the world. In Bangladesh, Fish and Fisheries sectors play an immensely important role in terms of nutrition, income, employment generation and foreign exchange earnings. Most of the lands in Sunamganj covered by haors and cannals and therefore many people in this area are involved in capturing fish than fish farming. In this study we aimed to assess the livelihood status of fishermen at Sunamganj. For this we randomly collected data based on a questionnaire from 425 fishermen during April 2018. We found most of the fishermen belong to middle age group and had middle family size. Around 56.3% fishermen took loan from different banks while only 3.1% received loan from NGO. The financial condition of fishers was observed very poor as the land owned by them was decreasing day by day. Though there was significant increase in monthly income compare to last 10 years, however it’s not sufficient for better livelihood. Their socio-economic condition doesn’t match with national economic progress. The results of logistic regression model shows that earning members had significant influence (OR=1.77, CI: 0.965,3.272, P<0.10) on taking loan, indicates that households with only one earning member are 1.77 times as likely to take loan than household with more than one earning members. That is taking loan is likely to increase around 77% for households with only one earning member. About 89.9% fishermen were afraid about their future earnings due to early/flash flood. Taken together, we may conclude that overall situation of the livelihood status is not so good because of more illiteracy, more loan and natural disasters like flood. So government and non-government organizations should play role to improve their economic status by providing well education to their children as well as give more incentives so that they don’t need to take loan. In addition, need to construct of embankment or dam for protecting them from flood as well.