Dr. Md. Shairul Mashreque :
Human trafficking through sea route stands out to be a stark violation of human rights. Latest news about the activities of the imposters and agents persuading the poor villagers to migrate to Thailand and Malaysia are eye boggling. We condemn such heinous design going all the way against humanity with the poor becoming the worst victims. As has been reported by the Special Rapporteur on the human rights of migrants (a report on his visit to Italy and a thematic report on EU border management to the UN Human Rights Council in June 2015) over 1000 deaths at sea of irregular migrants that have occurred in the last couple of weeks. The unnecessary deaths over the past few days hit news headlines. “Irregular migration continues to occur because of persistent and increasingly aggressive push factors, such as war, conflict, persecution, poor governance and extreme poverty, and because of durable pull factors such as underground labour markets in Global North countries. These push and pull factors haven’t changed in the recent past and are unlikely to change in the upcoming months and years.”
Push factors are:-
Poverty
Unreliable food services or famine
Environmental problems
Pollution
Drought
Natural disasters
Overcrowding or overpopulation
Fear of loss of wealth
Difficulty in finding courtship
High cost of living
Bullying
Religious or political oppression or persecution
Destructive, detrimental or otherwise undesirable legislature
Repressive culture
Warfare or civil strife
Pull factors are:-
More or better services in that area
More reliable food services (lower risk of famine)
Higher standards of living
Higher income
Peace (absence of civil strife or warfare)
Better behavior among the people (lower crime rates and higher moral standards)
More desirable climate (warmer)
Better chances of finding courtship
Immediate distance from family problems
Economic stability and less risk of loss of wealth
Cultural diversity
Religious or political tolerance (living in a more liberal or less repressive state or country)
More comfortable housing
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 makers 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 labouerers’ 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 (IFAD) 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%).
More pressing problem is the marketing of crops like rice. This year (2015) witnesses bumper crop production. Even then peasants continue to pull a long face. They are frustrated at the way the market behaves rather in an erratic way. There is no protection against offering cheap price to the primary producers by the middlemen. One farmer carrying paddy to Asugajanj marketing centre expressed utter frustration saying that this the reason (low price for crops) that compels many among us to accept risks of death and try to migrate to Thailand or elsewhere by sea. Even selling out one maund of crop cannot make them to buy one medium size hilsha fish.
(Dr. Md. Shairul Mashreque, Professor of Public Administration, Chittagong University)
