A survey of non-conventional plant items consumed during food scarcity in two randomly selected villages of Kurigram district, Bangladesh.

The northern districts of Bangladesh have generally lagged behind in the economic sense compared to the rest of the country. Industrial development is poor, there are no large urban areas, and the main occupations of the rural people are agriculture and agricultural laborer. Whereas in other areas of Bangladesh, the cultivators can produce up to three crops per year, the weather pattern and the poor condition of land in the northern districts enable only one, and only in certain areas, up to two crops per year. Agricultural labor demands peak during two periods, the period of sowing and the period of harvesting. In the interim periods, due to lack of other forms of unemployment, there develops an acute scarcity of food, which affects mostly the poor households. As a consequence, the people of the northern districts of Bangladesh suffer from seasonal famine during two periods of the year. This seasonal famine is locally called Monga and peaks twice per year during the Bengali months of Kartik (mid-October till mid-November) and Chaitra (mid-March till mid-April). During Monga, the people has to depend on consumption of non-conventional food items (usually plant derived) to satisfy their hunger and nutritional requirements. Since death due to Monga does not occur, there is sufficient reason to believe that these non-conventional plant items can be of enough nutritional value, and as such, they can with proper scientific investigation, be used as regular food items, particularly in regions of the world, where adverse weather or soil condition exists. Notably, these non-conventional plants are grown or collected from the wild, where they have been found to survive in poor soil and at times of the year like Kartik and Chaitra, when the weather is hot and dry. The objective of the present survey was to document the non-conventional plant items consumed by the poor households during times of food scarcity in the months of Kartik and Chaitra. The study was conducted in two randomly selected villages, namely Chargujimari and Kumar Para in the district of Kurigram, which is a northern district of Bangladesh and is yearly affected by Monga. Interviews were conducted among the poor households (income level less than US$ 30 per month) with the help of a semi-structured questionnaire. Detailed information about the mode of consumption of nonconventional plants was noted down and plant specimens brought to Bangladesh National Herbarium at Dhaka for identification. A total of 25 plants were found to be consumed by the poor households during the two Monga periods. The plants were distributed into 18 families; the Poaceae family provided 4 plants, while the Amaranthaceae family provided 3 plants. The staple food of Bangladeshis is rice, which is consumed with vegetables and pulses (by poor households) and with vegetables, pulses, fish and meat (by affluent households). It was observed that during periods of Monga (when staple diet of rice falls short), vegetables may form the main dish, with carbohydrate-rich sources like tubers or fruits of plants substituting for the role of rice. Rice is derived from paddy (Oryza sativa) seeds, which belongs to the Poaceae family. It was further noted that seeds of 4 other plants belonging to the Poaceae family were consumed during Monga periods, the seeds of all 4 plants being consumed as substitutes for rice. At a time of rising world hunger due to increases in