Coastal Commons and Food Security: Case Study of Sundarbans, West Bengal

DOI

10.2991/978-94-6463-766-3_4How to use a DOI?

Keywords

Coastal Commons; Food and Nutritional Security; Marginalised group

Abstract

Sundarbans, a region with 4.5 million residents, 85% of whom depend on paddy cultivation, fishing, crab gathering, and honey collection. Food insecurity is widespread—44% of households cannot secure even two square meals a day. Climate change further threatens traditional livelihoods by disrupting the freshwater supply. Given the background, this paper explores the role of coastal commons in providing food security, specifically regarding two pillars- physical availability and accessibility in the Sundarbans, using the Household Consumption Expenditure Survey 2022. The study reveals that 99% of households consuming food from the commons are marginal landholders, with a major proportion belonging to the Priority Household (PHH) ration card holders. However, significant disparities in food consumption value, especially among Other Backwards Classes (OBC) with unreserved, Scheduled Cate and Scheduled Tribes, suggest structural barriers to equitable access. Despite relying on a representative sample of Sundarbans due to data limitations, the paper highlights the need for further research on the socio-ecological and institutional factors influencing coastal commons and food security.

Copyright

© 2025 The Author(s)

Open Access

Open Access This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/), which permits any noncommercial use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made.

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TY  - CONF
AU  - Chandrima Biswas
AU  - Gummadi Sridevi
PY  - 2025
DA  - 2025/06/24
TI  - Coastal Commons and Food Security: Case Study of Sundarbans, West Bengal
BT  - Proceedings of the IBA IEA Conference on Economics and Public Policy (Ecofluence 2024)
PB  - Atlantis Press
SP  - 55
EP  - 75
SN  - 2352-5428
UR  - https://doi.org/10.2991/978-94-6463-766-3_4
DO  - 10.2991/978-94-6463-766-3_4
ID  - Biswas2025
ER  -