Challenges in Agrobiodiversity Maintenance in Southwest Bangladesh: An Intersectional Analysis

Guided by the intersectional approach, the objective of the paper is to engage gender as an analytical variable across class and spatial inequalities to explore agrobiodiversity maintenance. The paper dwells on challenges faced, and factors influencing agrobiodiversity choices and its maintenance. Data was collected from a survey of 343 households, 14 focus group discussions conducted in seven villages, and in-depth interviews with 30 research participants in Southwest Bangladesh. The findings show that challenges in maintaining agrobiodiversity and its choices are gender, class, and spatially differentiated within the context of environmental change. The challenges faced by rural households in maintaining agrobiodiversity are not linear and straightforward and poor women are inclined to make choices to ensure food security and wellbeing of the family. Therefore, understanding how overlapping inequalities in rural farming areas experiencing environmental change is key to the design of agrobiodiversity-based solutions towards food security for the poor.