In January, the government issued the Land Use Control and Agricultural Land Protection Act, 2026, a sweeping new law criminalising hill-cutting, wetland-filling, and the removal of topsoil for brick kilns, with penalties of up to two years’ imprisonment or fines of up to Tk 2 lakh or both. The law explicitly bans tobacco cultivation on multi-crop land. It is, on paper, exactly the kind of legal instrument the country’s hill ecosystems have needed for decades. However, interestingly, none of it applies to Bandarban, Rangamati, or Khagrachhari, the three districts that make up the Chittagong Hill Tracts (CHT). The region where tobacco-driven hill-cutting and topsoil loss are arguably most severe has simply been written out of the one law which could have stopped these practices there.
This is not an oversight as much as it is a pattern. In Alikadam Upazila, where I spent several weeks in the tobacco-growing paras of Morong, College, and Palong during the 2025 curing season, the absence of regulatory reach is not simply a gap in an otherwise functioning system. And it raises a question that conventional environmental reporting tends to avoid: at what point does legally permitted ecological destruction stop being an externality and start being, in substance, a crime?
Criminologist Rob White has spent two decades arguing that the answer to this should not depend on whether an activity is technically illegal. His framework of eco-global criminology insists that environmental harm, which is structurally produced, predictable, and disproportionately borne by the powerless, deserves to be named and analysed as a crime, regardless of its legal status. Judged by that standard, the tobacco economy of Alikadam is more than an unfortunate side effect of agricultural development.
The Matamuhuri river and its tributaries are the only source of fish protein and household-use water for the Mro and Bangalee settler families who farm on its banks. During the dry winter cultivation season, farmers run diesel-powered pumps to draw river water directly onto tobacco fields; by one cultivator’s account, this means three full waterings a season, each expending 10 to 15 litres of diesel per acre. Multiplied across hundreds of farms along the valley, this is a substantial, concentrated extraction precisely when river flows are at their lowest. The water that returns to the stream carries fertiliser and pesticide residue. A schoolteacher in College Para put it simply: the fish are fewer every year. A Bangalee settler farmer was blunter still, gesturing at the stream bordering his field: in five years, there will be no water left in it because the trees that once fed it are being cut for curing fuel.
That is a hydrologically sound diagnosis. Forest cover sustains the dry-season flow of small streams; as tree cover is stripped to fuel the kilns that cure each season’s leaves, the watershed’s capacity to recharge is degraded alongside the direct pressure of irrigation pumping. Government rules nominally prohibit cultivation within a hundred feet of riverbanks and forbid extraction from reserve forests. Every farmer I interviewed described enforcement of both as effectively absent.
The forest pays in its own way, too. Curing tobacco leaves demands sustained, high-intensity heat, and the regional fuel source is wood-drawn, by multiple accounts, from both legally purchased stock and the adjacent Matamuhuri Reserve Forest itself. What was, within living memory, a mixed landscape of jhum plots, forest garden, and secondary growth has become, across an estimated 85 to 90 percent of Alikadam’s cultivable land at peak season, a single industrial crop running in regimented rows.
None of this required anyone to break the law. That is precisely White’s point, and precisely why “slow violence,” the literary scholar Rob Nixon’s term for harm that accumulates gradually and out of sight, without the single catastrophic event that triggers regulatory attention, is the right description for what is happening in the CHT’s valleys. Each season’s cutting, watering, and fertiliser application is individually unremarkable. But their cumulative trajectory year after year translates to a hill ecology being dismantled in a manner that is specific enough to have a shape but legal enough to escape scrutiny.
The new land-use law had the chance to close part of that gap. But the explicit exclusion of the three hill districts means that the law’s ban on tobacco cultivation on multi-crop land, its penalties for hill-cutting and topsoil removal, and its protections for water bodies will, for now, simply not reach Alikadam, Lama, or any other tobacco-growing upazilas in Bandarban. Environmental lawyers and officials who welcomed the ordinance elsewhere in the country have been candid that even where it does apply, enforcement will determine whether it changes anything at all. In the CHT, the question of enforcement does not even arise.
What would taking this seriously look like? At minimum, the government should publicly explain the legal and administrative rationale for excluding the CHT’s three districts from a land-protection ordinance whose stated purpose (preventing hill-cutting, topsoil loss, and the conversion of multi-crop land to tobacco) describes Alikadam’s tobacco frontier almost exactly. The parliament’s environment committee should examine whether that exclusion can be narrowed or removed. And the forest and environment department should be required to report, annually and publicly, on enforcement of the riverbank and reserve-forest protections that already exist on paper, so that “minimal and inconsistent” stops being a private observation farmers make to researchers and becomes a documented public fact.
One farmer in Alikadam, who has cultivated tobacco on leased land for years, offered me an assessment that needs no criminological vocabulary to be understood: “First is health. Second is the soil. Third is the environment,” he’d said. “Tobacco is a weapon of capital. This isn’t a crop for poor, innocent people.”
A law that exempts the region where that weapon is doing the most damage is not protecting the environment. It is choosing, deliberately, where the law’s protection will end.
Nur Nishat Anjum has an MSS in anthropology from the University of Dhaka. Her thesis examines BAT contract farming, Mro indigenous dispossession, and socio-ecological harm in Alikadam Upazila, Bandarban District, Chittagong Hill Tracts. She can be reached at [email protected].
Views expressed in this article are the author's own.
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