Do I Dare
Food First: The Sweat of Other Men's Faces
President Abraham Lincoln, in his second Inaugural Address referred to "the sweat of other mens' faces." It captures most succinctly the development experience of Bangladesh. It is the sweat of the farmers and the quantum jump in agricultural production and productivity that have been and will continue to be the prime mover for accelerated growth and equitable development in Bangladesh Dr. Joe Stepaneck puts it well, when he says: "The social pay-off for placing 'food first' is the harmony between growth policies, participation in that growth, and so, in equitable, poverty-reducing impact." He adds further that if there is no demand for both staple food-grains and other high value produce, them there will be harvest glut with consequent price-slumps. On the other hand, if urban demand grows a lot faster than supplies, urban wage demand will be in price rises which can discourage investment and further employment.
This is not an illusion and the evidence in Bangladesh is quite clear. Once denigrated by Henry Kissingers as an international basket case, the farmers of the country have proved such a formidable prophet of doom wrong. Food production has increased twofold and more since independence and today food self-sufficiency is no longer a mirage but clearly attainable. Real price of rice has fallen by half over the first two decades, real wages are up, and the secular decline of fertility rate continues. Even the annual growth rate of the economy trapped in the lowly 4 per cent or less syndrome for twenty five years jumped to 5.7 per cent in 1997, Agriculture grew at 6 per cent in FY 96-97.
The harvest jumped due primarily to the revolution in seed-technology, and three per cent annual growth is today a long-term sustainable possibility. The proviso, however, is that farmers must have access to new and healthy seed both in terms of its availability and of access to credit to purchase the same. Unfortunately, the seed replacement rate today is less than 5 per cent, and a robust seed industry is yet to take off. In that context, the importance of agriculture research and the requisite knowledge base for assessment, introduction and adaptation of frontier technology needs to be stressed. Raisuddin Ahmed of IFPRI says it well when he states, "a continuous flow of improved technology remains vital for providing a powerful incentive to sustain growth in production within a socially tolerably price environment."
Price environment poses another problem. A major governmental rice purchasing programme contributed to increased production level in the early nineties. But in 1994, when government ran out of money and a drought occurred, purchases stopped and production fell. It underscores, as Joe Stempaneck says, "the age-old public problem of finding ways to sustain food price incentives and food production without doing so at such price levels that consumers protest or the budget collapses." Ultimately growth across Bangladesh is required so that millions of better off consumers purchase the country's harvests and thereby sustain incentive prices for her farmers and the crops they produce. Farmers can grow more food, if there is a market.
However that may be, policy decision by successive governments to relax and eliminate the monopoly control over agricultural inputs, particularly irrigation equipment and fertiliser, has been a major factor in the quantum jump of production and productivity. Historically Bangladesh turned green in the monsoon rains, and again brown in the winter. With the proliferation of shallow-tubewells and low-lift pumps and other small surface irrigation channels, a stage for three crops a year has been set. Rural/electrification has also helped in bringing down the cost of water. Further, liberalisation of the agricultural inputs market has resulted in an explosion of retailers and service-providers, employing well over a hundred thousand business people in the informal sector.
This good news, however, still leaves tens of millions of people below any acceptable poverty line. Because rural poverty in Bangladesh is so intimately linked with land-tenure, security of share-croppers and reasonable wage for agricultural labour need to be looked at as well. Much of the land is not tilled by owners and their families, but by tenants and hired labour. Security of tenancy, and the promise of a fair share of the crop produced can encourage share-croppers to invest in better seeds, water and other inputs. Evidence on trends in rear rural wage is encouraging.
Clearly, agriculture alone cannot absorb the expanding rural labour, many of whom today are un and underemployed. A transition to an industrial and then an information society, is called for. But, for opening up employment opportunities for the rural unemployed and the youth, a few urban enterprises will not do. A domestic dynamic has to be created for small businesses and enterprises dispersed all over the country.
That is why, however paradoxical it may seem, agriculture remains so important for Bangladesh. If agriculture is stagnant then agriculturally based foreign exchange earnings will not grow. The examples are expanding export of frozen fish and as yet incipient potential of fresh and semi-processed vegetables and fruits. Likewise food will grow costly, demand will slow, investment will fall and the size of domestic market will remain modest if not stagnant.
Again, policies and investments to stimulate agricultural and rural growth will create growth in other sectors as well. New incomes created by a whole range of grains and high value crops do and will generate further demands for other goods like local fruits, vegetables, poultry, fish, dairy products as well as for manufactured goods like bicycles, motor cycles, radios and television sets. There will be increased demand for services such as agricultural implements, machine shops, processing enterprises for grains, vegetables and fruits, tailoring and dress making. Consequently both rural and urban businesses, particularly agri-business, will find their markets expanding.
The other almost fortuitous result of food first policy is that as most of these initial income increases go for resource poor farmers, food consumption increases disproportionately. "This is how growth and equity strategies are combined into one. The poorest have the highest 'growth-multipliers' for the domestic economy because they spend almost all of their income on basic foods." The key in the process of expanding income opportunities for the small farmers and the rural poor is access to cost reducing technologies, credit, incentive prices, better roads, market information and infrastructure. The benefits are multiple and sustainable across an economy.
Looking into the future is not a task for the faint-hearted, but look we must. The Bangladesh government, while savouring its successes, must accelerate the reform processes by unleashing the creativity of the rural poor themselves, the private sector and the non-government organisations. It must empower and endow people with their control over knowledge resources. Perhaps the successes of a production breakthrough can be used in strengthening the government's efforts at decentralising the political system. These efforts, hopefully, will result in rural institutional strengthening and in devolution of planning and resource control to local government for a range of productivity enhancing economic and social programmes. Any responsive governance needs to be a shared one with local representative institutions and rural administration as well as with market.
Perhaps, therein lies the key to a poverty alleviation strategy that could transform the safety net programme for the absolute poor into a sustainable human development one. That will require a strong local government and a renewed institutional capacity. The deepening challenge of broad based participatory democracy in Bangladesh is precisely the same.
Having said that, let me underscore once again that agricultural production is the key to further reductions in rural poverty. To quote Joe Stepaneck, "No other production or welfare strategy can be as cost effective. No matter the uncertainty surrounding the tenure, or the costs of rural works, agricultural production is the only way to reach tens of millions of people , and help them across the poverty line. This 'line of defence' must be seen as primary; other strategies will always be of secondary importance for the numbers they can reach and for their cost."
The 'vision thing', in that context, is no doubt important. Equally important is to remember that "the prospect of disaster can be just around the next season's corner or up out of the Bay of Bengal." The challenge we all face is to sustain the creation of food, work and income. To do so, we must look at agriculture first. And that means, a change in our urban mindset about the farmers, tenants and agricultural labourers in the hinterland as the captive suppliers of surplus food and labour. We, the privileged few, all depend on them. If they prosper, we survive; if they trek the lonely path towards premature graves, we also perish. Mahatma Gandhi said it all when he said: "To a people hungry and idle, God can only appear in the form of food and work."
For all latest news, follow The Daily Star's Google News channel.
Comments