Dr. Md. Shairul Mashreque :
Poverty in Bangladesh is primarily a ‘rural phenomenon’ with “53 percent of its rural population classified as poor, comprising about 85 percent of the country’s poor. Achieving the Millennium Development Goal (MDG) of halving poverty to 26.5 percent by 2015 will require a growth rate of at least 4.0 percent in agriculture and 7.0 percent in the non-farm sector. However, economic and institutional realities, the country’s geographical and demographic characteristics, and its vulnerability to natural disasters, make this a very challenging task”, observed experts.
Land-base in rural areas is shrinking ‘while the country’s population is growing at the rate of 1.6 percent per year, demographic pressures and increased urbanization has caused cultivated area to decline at a rate of 1 percent per year. As cropping intensity has approached its limit (about 175 percent now), growth will need to come from intensification of cereal production, diversification into high-value crop and non-crop activities, and value addition in the agro-processing sector, including storage, processing and marketing. This will require reforming the agricultural research and extension systems, and financial and other regulations. Land administration and security issues also need to be addressed”. That is the common agreement of the development gurus.
From time immemorial rural economy operated as the supplier of food and raw materials. Exploitative machinery sucked the blood of the peasants who used to contribute substantially to crop production but received much less below the market rate. Subject to notorious process of exploitation many among the small farmers being rendered landless have to drift to town to change their lots. Now the village has become the supplier of cheap labour in urban areas.
There is no denying the fact that unless the policy makes mull steps to address the predicaments of the farmers living below poverty line any attempts at poverty reduction will be meaningless. The first and foremost duty is to rethink development to combat the problems of marginalization and pauperization accumulated during the lengthy process of deprivation and neglect.
Well, our think tanks stress the importance of food security as a matter of contemporary global concern. Agricultural development project cannot bypass the burning issue like the survival of the small farmers and the landless. Their maladies have accentuated due to perennial neglect the non-monetized and stagnant rural economy suffer.
Landholding in our country has long been subdivided and fragmented due to the operation of the law of inheritance. Population pressure over land has become unmanageable. The result is fast increasing of the number of marginal farmers and the farmers with no arable land. Those without land till cultivable plot either as wage earners or share croppers. The pre-existing process of production based lopsided economic relationship can hardly provide any incentives to the marginal farmers. Low productivity of the poor farmers as ‘farm laborers’ may be attributed to the stingy benefits offered to this toiling working class that cannot be called incentives as such. The small farmers hard pressed by increasing marginalization sell their land thus creating ‘uneconomic size of land’. The phenomenon of small holding estate poses a threat to food security. Capital investment on intensive cultivation for producing enough food has been in doldrums in the context of subsistence economy.
Any attempt at reinvigorating rural economy warrants acceleration of small and the landless development through institution building. We have an institution like small farmer development programme (SFDP). In fact the vulnerable has been brought into policy fold under this institutional safety umbrella. Awakening of the small farmers and the landless to buttress their organization potentials to the desired level can help them to be self-supporting backed by an institutional agency. They will be able to change their outlook, attitude and approach. There needs to be action research under the aegis of small holder agricultural programme with a’ full sequence of data collection; time series data, compilation, analysis, documentations and participatory assessment methods.
True scores of marginal farmers’ families suffer displacement and dislocation because of climate change. The vulnerability of the marginal in the coastal belt beggar description. As has been reported by business desk, the New Nation, ‘small holder farmers in developing countries , who are working to grow more food in some of the world’s most marginalized areas are already facing more job and livelihood challenges due to severe weather such as droughts and floods. The upcoming intergovernmental panel on climate change (IPCC) physical science summary will be of crucial importance for the 2 billion people dependent on small holder farms, many of which are owned and operated by families. As small farmers in developing countries are among the most affected by climate change the time to adapt cannot be delayed. IFAD’s new adaptation for small holder agricultural programme (ASAP) is now the largest global initiative dedicated to supporting the adaptation of poor smallholder farmers to climate change across the world. (The New Nation, 24 September. 2013 p.13)
Alarmingly the number of landless and sharecropper has registered an upward trend according to the report of the recent agricultural census. There has been sharp decrease in the size and number of agricultural farms. The concentration of the landless proletariat in the capital city is not a health sign. 2008 statistics revealed that there are 321 lakh 60 thousand landless households (12.84%).
“Bangladesh is the terminal floodplain delta of three large rivers – Ganges, Brahmaputra and Meghna. Every year about 20 to 30 percent, and every few years about 40 percent, of the country is flooded, causing serious damage to infrastructure, crops and the overall economy. Projected climatic changes and rise in the sea level are likely to worsen the situation. Since independence in 1971, the Government has made large investments to protect against floods and cyclones. However, issues such as public and private roles and community participation in disaster management, environmental protection, and institutional reforms of Bangladesh Water Development Board (BWDB), need to be addressed.”
Policy makers have by now given a serious thought to the gravity of the crisis like environment degradation. Realizing that environment degradation stemming from climate change cannot be reversed they think to opt for mitigation of sufferings and dislocation and enhancement of coping capacities of the coastal inhabitants. Crisis management is a two-fold mechanism-mitigation and survival. As the Finance Minister said “We should aim to mitigate dislocation and build the capacity to adapt lives and livelihoods”. A detailed action plan will be taken to combat ‘disasters due to climate change’. The government has the plan to complete the review of medium and long term strategies to be prepared to ‘prevent the disasters.’
All the same they think to maintain ecological balance and bio-diversity in the Sundarbans. Production of environment friendly renewable energy technologies is under active consideration. There is a plan to ‘bring 20 per cent of total land under afforestation programmes by 2015 to attain self-sufficiency in forest resources’.
Our think tanks at numerous climate seminars home and abroad talked in terms of conserving land and water in Bangladesh taking lesson learned from super cyclones-ail and sidre for example. They stressed long term planning on sustainable basis to minimize cyclone devastation and its aftermath suggesting a special design of embankment and ‘planting deep-rooted tree species in the coastal belt and promoting salinity-resistant or tolerant crops’.
(Dr. Md. Shairul Mashreque, Professor of Public Administration, University of Chittagong.
