Dr. Md. Shairul Mashreque and Dr. Abul Kashem Mozumder :
A popular government bothers much about accountability and transparency. In fact it thinks what is good and bad about government and the performance of government on the overall society. Even for effective implementation of public policy on agriculture and food securiyu the government of the day cannot ignore accountability and transparency.
Accountability serves to clarify and justify actions. It implies that someone has a right to know and hold an organisation to account; and that the organisation has a duty to explain and account for its actions. Charities have this duty as they have a privileged status because their purposes must be for the benefit of the public.
Transparency is about being easy to understand, and being open, frank and honest in all communications, transactions and operations. It is possible to be accountable by providing a lengthy and technical explanation of every detail, but if this information is not easily understood by the audience, and if key facts are hidden by the sheer volume of information then the information is not presented in a transparent form. Accountability and transparency go hand-in-hand, and involve being aware of who charities are accountable to, what the important pieces of information are, and how they can be communicated most effectively.
Transparency and accountability are the two inevitable terms that are often referred to as the hallmark of good governance. A good public administration is unthinkable without the virtues of transparency and accountability in the system. Both the terms are often used interchangeably. By transparency we mean a visible and clear system of administration well-aware to all walks of people. The Oxford English Dictionary defines ‘transparent’ as ‘frank, open, candid, ingenuous’. Transparency is thus the antonym of secrecy, which is the traditional hallmark of public administration. While secrecy is essential in certain spheres of sovereignty, the general policy should be to place public administration in a glasshouse and let its functioning be known to the society at large.
Accountability, on the other hand, is defined as the state of being accountable, liable or answerable. To be accountable means to be obliged to report, explain or justify something. It ensures that something is carried out as expected. Accountability means to be answerable to one’s senior when one renders a report of the decisions and the quantity and quality of action in the course of carrying out responsibilities.
Accountability is reinforced by punitive action. It also means that one can face different consequences ranging from censure to dismissal. L. D. White defines accountability as the ‘sum total of the constitutional, statutory, administrative and judicial rules and precedents and the established practices by means of which public officials may he held accountable for their official action’.
Agricultural development project cannot bypass the burning issues 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 devastating flood that vist every year during monsoon.
The poor farmers have 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 tremendous economic losses because of flood and super cyclone after the end of winter season. 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.
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. Realizing that environment degradation stemming from climate change cannot be reversed they think agricultural development rather in indigenous settings keeping in mind sustainability context.
The idea of transparency and accountability is considered essential in achieving food security through different SSN programs. The program of VGD, VGF and FFW, which is taken as experimental cases in the study among different SSN programs, are believed to be effective, if the presence of two essential elements of good governance – transparency and accountability are conspicuous by their virtual non-existence at the lowest tier of the local level administration.
Four factors are assumed essential in achieving food security. These are:
:Availability of adequate food supplies – there must be enough food to ensure that each person’s daily energy and nutrient needs can be met. Access to sufficient food even in a country with adequate food supplies, food security does not exist for those who cannot afford to buy enough and/or grow their own. Stability of supplies – severe fluctuations in food availability or accessibility, caused by such factors as droughts, floods, sharp price increases or seasonal unemployment, leave people vulnerable. Cultural acceptability – use of certain foods, food combinations or handling methods can be preempted by religious or cultural taboos.
(Dr. Md. Shairul Mashreque is a retired professor, Public Administration, Chittagong University and Dr. M. Abul Kashem Mozumder is Pro-VC, BUP).
