The Weed That Pays a Wage

Eichhornia crassipes arrived in Bengal as an ornamental in the nineteenth century, admired for a lilac flower that looks like an orchid and behaves like a fire. On open water it can double its biomass in twelve days. By August, whole stretches of the Meghna's tributaries are a green floor you could almost believe would hold your weight.

For fishing families this is not a metaphor. A mat of hyacinth shades out the water beneath it, drops the dissolved oxygen and takes the fish with it. Boats cannot pass. Irrigation intakes clog. For most of the last century the only response was to pay men to drag it out and leave it to rot on the bank.

What changed in Pirojpur was not the plant but the drying. Stems pulled in July and laid on a bamboo rack for ten to fourteen days do not rot — they cure, shrinking to about a fifth of their weight and turning the colour of old rope. Cured hyacinth is strong in compression and almost impossible to snap across the grain. Coiled over a cane armature and stitched with cotton, it will hold the wall of a basket for twenty years.

Eighty-eight households in the district now weave. The economics are unusual: the raw material has a negative price, because clearing it is a service the community wanted done anyway. What the weavers sell is not fibre. It is time, skill and the geometry held in their hands.

There is a lesson in it that goes beyond baskets. The most sustainable material in any supply chain is usually the one somebody is already paying to dispose of. Our areca tableware is a fallen leaf. Our paper is jute mill offcut. Our coconut bowls are the shell left after the copra is sold. None of it required a new hectare of anything.