Badrul Ahsan :A man who started his charity as a temporary relief organization in Bangladesh has, in course of time, got the ultimate respect and recognition in the international arena as creator of revolution in food production for poverty alleviation. BRAC Founder and Chairperson Sir Fazle Hasan Abed was honoured as the 2015 World Food Prize Laureate on October 16, 2015 for his outstanding contribution to enhance the world’s production and distribution of food to those most in need.Sir Fazle Hasan Abed created BRAC (Bangladesh Rural Advancement Committee) as a temporary relief organisation to help the country recover from the 1970 typhoon that killed about 500,000 people of the once listed as one of the poorest countries in the world. “The highly prestigious prize, known as Nobel Prize for food and agriculture, was conferred on him has uplifted the country’s image to a certain stage of prestige in the globe,” said a former adviser to the caretaker government. Dr. Akbar Ali said Sir Fazle Hasan Abed deserves this prestigious honour. After a through study on his long journey, this reporter learnt that after working for a while against poverty in Shalla, a small region of Bangladesh, the World Food Prize Laureate found deep-rooted problem of powerlessness among the poor — a lack of agency, a lack of control over even the smallest aspects of their lives. Eventually, in his efforts to empower them, BRAC entered into a series of dialogues with the villagers on an adult education programme. One of the first words in its curriculum was “hunger,” or upash. People in the villages were very familiar with this word and concept, and the discussions became quite animated. According to different write-up of Sir Abed, many of the poverty hit people said that being hungry was like being in prison, locked away in a cage, isolated from others, and unable to communicate with anyone else, except for others who were also hungry and in a similar state of powerlessness.”We began thinking about what we could do to remove those conditions. We introduced group-based microcredit without collateral, allowing people to borrow and invest in new seeds, fertilizer, and farming technologies without the high rates charged by moneylenders,” he wrote in one of his articles about his journey.”We introduced homestead vegetable gardens, financed by micro-loans, to add nutrients to people’s diets. Later, we began introducing entirely new crops, such as maize, which was linked to a poultry industry centered on female farmers. We built value chains for other industries, such as dairy, to benefit women who owned milk cows.” “Today, I am pleased to say that Bangladesh has achieved self-sufficiency in food production. Though our population has gone up 2.2 times since independence, our food production has gone up 3.1 times. This has happened through widespread irrigation during the dry seasons, the introduction of improved varieties, more effective usage of fertilizer, and other changes to farming practices,” the World Food Prize Laureate in a recent writ up said.”I believe that the true promise of the Green Revolution means breaking free from hunger.”BRAC, that started its journey with a vision to fight poverty alleviation in a small area of Bangladesh through creating revolution in food production, in course of time, has emerged as the largest non-governmental organization (NGO) of the globe.Excepting Bangladesh, BRAC is now working in ten other poverty-hit countries of the globe namely — Afghanistan, Pakistan, the Philippines, Sri Lanka, Liberia, Sierra Leone, South Sudan, Tanzania, Uganda and Haiti.
