Researchers point out that the gap between income and expenditure of the low-income group – a clear sign of income poverty – creates manifold social problems including violence and corruption. Poor salary structure of the fixed income group causes erosion of ethical values. The members of this group living in metropolitan cities and peri-urban communities have inadequate level of living, with poor health status, poor food, insanitary housing and poor amenities. On the otherhand, income of the wage labor, marginal peasants and the landless in rural areas is too meager to make both ends meet. The migrant labors drifting into towns for working in industrial, manufacturing sectors and those drawing small amount of money from rendering services in private sector and from various small trades suffer a lot as the most vulnerable. More, aggravation of unemployment situation in villages and towns is worsening poverty situation that creates the crisis of terrorism of the spoiled youth.
Distressingly low income group and the unemployed youth / girls having no income source are hard hit for tremendous rise in cost of living as well as for unprecedented inflationary any stress caused by extremely high salaries of the consultants and high level project personnel and corruption of the high-ups in bureaucratic contingents of administration. The situation such as this warrants a systematic policy analysis on the economy, society and poverty situation in Bangladesh.
The least developed countries (LDCs) can pin high hopes about the future of anti poverty social movement. For, the UN is determined to combat a worse poverty situation a threat to human dignity – by declaring International Decade for the Eradication of Poverty (1997-2006). More heartening is the advocacy and campaign for Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) to curb poverty situation. Constitutional obligations, various international conference, UN poverty alleviation decade and MDGs mandate governments to promote improvement of the lower income group of population and sustainable development through resilient macro economics and different social indicators as the targets for social welfare programs. The state shaped the policy framework and this turned to the latest dimension of poverty alleviation policy in the name of Poverty Reduction Strategy Paper (PRSP). Of late, the planning and policymaking agencies of Bangladesh have adopted appropriate strategies for economic growth and poverty reduction. The target of social welfare is to be achieved through a comprehensive approach on the social indicators like adult literacy, enrollment, health, and population.
It is true that stable growth is absolutely impossible without poverty alleviation. Contemporary policy concerns about the magnitude of poverty emphasize increasing institutional attention to the alleviation of worst form of pauperization. Hardcore poverty (HCP) now posing a formidable threat to stability is the culmination of fuzzy governance and misdirected policy intervention. Policy strategies influenced by exogenous factors like globalization and SAP rather add to structural tension by reinforcing HCP.
Challenges of the SDG are hard facts about structural tension that looms large in HCP. Policy revision with shifting strategies has been given due institutional attention with the advent of the issue of HCP. However, it is not presumptive to comment that peasant economy developed overtime as a sign of stable agricultural development is facing griping cries in the midst of HCP. Some features of crisis syndrome bedeviling peasant economic life are: population explosion, fragmentation and subdivision of holding, river erosion, flood, draught, epidemics, politics of scarcity, indebtedness, bhumi santras (land terrorism), loss of cooperative based integration, dilapidated living conditions, malnutrition, starvation, like access to marketing and adverse effects of external intervention that threaten withdrawal of govt. subsidies.
Human development sector is considered of critical importance for poverty alleviation. Target oriented emphasis of this sector is aimed at increasing income generating activities for the surplus human resources. The micro credit delivery system intends to enhance productive capacities of the poor enabling them to find way out of dependency. This is sort of outreach program now under the threshold of expansion to address the issue of hard-core poverty. Another outreach program to ‘put the last first’ is non-formal primary education (NFPE).
Nevertheless hard facts about the lives of the ‘last’ but not least are starvation, half meal, malnutrition, disease, epidemics, poor housing and unhygienic living conditions, ill treatment by the security forces and fear of hooliganism. Many a study on human development presents a pen picture about a grim poverty situation touching upon hard facts about the suffering masses remaining at the outer margin of development policies.
Eight MDG goals range from halving extreme poverty to halting the spread of HIV/AIDS and providing universal primary education – have been a milestone in global and national development efforts. The framework has helped to galvanize development efforts and guide global and national development priorities. While three of the eight goals have been achieved prior to the final deadline of 2015 progress has been uneven within and across countries. Thus further efforts and a strong global partnership for development are needed to accelerate progress and reach the goals by 2015. 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
17 October is marked out as a day for observing eradication of poverty. It reminds us of the urgency to rid the poor below overt line to of the onslaught of pauperization. The theme of 2014is: Leave no one behind, think, decide and act together aganst extreme poverty. The 2014 theme recognizes and underscores the demanding challenge of identifying and securing the participation of those experiencing extreme poverty and social exclusion in the “Post-2015 Development Agenda” that will replace the Millennium Development Goals. The official commemoration on 17 October at UN Headquarters will be an occasion to recognize people living in poverty as critical partners for fighting the development challenges we face.
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. The 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 smallholder 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. 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 smallholder 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. Alarmingly the number of landless and sharecropper has registered an upward trend
The anchorage point for sustainable development (SD) is sustainable development goal (SDG). SDG has been very recently set to fill up the gap in the state of policy intervention for reduction of poverty with the elements of sustainability. Previously global concerns about poverty reduction revolved around Millennium development goals (MDG) containing 8 goals like– tenable up to 2015.
(Dr. Md. Shairul Mashreque is a former professor of Chittagong University and Dr. M Abul Kashem Mozumder is Pro-VC of BUP).
