Mr. Khaybar Sardar from Koyra, Bangladesh, awarded Paul K. Feyerabend Laureate 2024 for ‘exceptional contribution to community solidarity’.

Following an FPP nomination, the Swiss Paul K. Feyerabend Foundation (PKF) has selected Mr. Khaybar Sardar from Koyra as one of the three winners of the 2024 PKF award.  With this yearly award the Foundation highlights and honours exceptionally successful work for solidarity within or between communities. The award “acknowledges and encourages remarkable accomplishments that represent a true source of inspiration” and is offered to exemplary individuals, communities or organisations that brought about crucial and lasting change for community solidarity under difficult circumstances.

The piece on Mr. Sardar’s Laureate can be read here on the PKF website

Mr. Md. Khaybar Sardar from Koyra, Amadi Union, Khulna, is one of the eldest active traditional resource collectors in the Sundarbans, and dedicated to passing on his knowledge and experience to new generations. He’s widely known as the inventor and pioneer of an integrated mangrove aqua-silviculture system which is an innovative system that optimally uses scarce available land, and salinity rich lands, very intensively and efficiently. As he generously shared his innovation, this system has now become popular among many neighbouring Sundarbans communities, improving livelihood security to the community through generation of multiple income sources, while it also reverses mangrove degradation and protects the mangrove ecosystem from climatic changes such as erosion.

The Koyra communities have faced tremendous climate change impacts in the past two decades, all driven by anthropogenic pressures like illegal destruction and conversion of forest (mangrove) into commercial shrimp cultivation, and with recurring cyclones hitting the coast and tidal waves leaving much of the Sundarbans damaged, including many peoples’ homes, plots and crops, equipment and gear such as boats and nets. Social security or protection programmes in Bangladesh are near-inexistent or at best inadequate and fragmented. The majority of communities lacked resilience capacity against the unprecedented natural shocks. Inter- and intra community solidarity and cooperation is therefore crucial.

Around 3.5 million people are directly or indirectly dependent on the Sundarbans for livelihoods. The rights, knowledge and customs of these traditional resource users are hardly recognised in Bangladesh’s Forest Act and the management of the national parks and world heritage sites remains very colonial and top-down, imposing access restrictions and closures on the forest-dependent groups which are marginalized and struggle to get by.

To stand stronger together and to exchange knowledge and enhance capital, since 2011 three forest peoples’ co-operatives were set up, with the support of FPP’s partner Unnayan Onneshan. These have been very successful in empowering the members, especially women’s groups, to engage with the government and to develop alternative additional livelihood income strategies. There are a total of 350 households united in three cooperatives. Mr. Sardar has been one of the elders who have taken the communities by the hand to move forward and develop adaptive and alternative practices. He has played a hugely motivational and empowering role to the younger generations in the cooperatives, setting examples, stressing the value and sophistication of their own traditional knowledge, practices. For example he frequently conducts trainings on traditional sustainable honey collection methodologies.

This award is a recognition of  Mr. Sardar’s contribution to the communities, and will hopefully spark inspiration to other (younger) members of the cooperatives to be innovative, trust their knowledge and wisdom, and collaborate and share with others. Each award comprises a plaque/certificate and a small financial envelope. It will be delivered during a public ceremony in Koyra later this year.