Bangladesh farmers push for temporary flooding to correct Dutch polder failure

Controlling floods and raising rice production in Bangladesh have been the centres of struggle for nearly a century - between North and South, and between engineering solutions and local knowledge. Decades of disastrous construction of dikes and polders led first to local protest, including cutting dikes, and then to a structured local solution known as tidal river management, which won the support of Bangladeshi scientists and academics. Suddenly, the global North has noticed and is rushing to catch up - asking what local farmers knew and hydraulic engineers did not, while trying to maintain the dominance of aid industry engineers and technicians in Bangladesh