Do I Dare!
Sudden Splendour of the Dazzling Light: People, Work and Income
The Dancing Horizon, a UNDP publication notes that Bangladesh faces some inexorable arithmetic. Annual population growth has fallen to 1.8 per cent. It is expected that by the year 2005, fertility rate will fall to 2.2 children per mother-replacement rate. Yet the population momentum will propel the total number, now at 124 million, upwards until around the year 2045, by which time it could plateau at 250 million or more. Landlessness today in the countryside is extremely high. Squalor in the major cities conjure up images of necro-cities or the cities of the dying and the dead. Providing food, work and shelter for double today's population is a daunting task.
Yet it is the resilient people of the country who are its greatest resource - the farmers who are transplanting rice, the women members of Grameen Bank or BRAC who are setting up micro-enterprises for self-employment, the weavers who are finding a niche in the global market with Grameen check, or the mostly female workers in garment factories who are stitching a million seams. Finding resources and support structures to harness their creativity fully, empowering them with knowledge resources, and providing them opportunities for work and income is the singular priority for decades to come.
In the past, much of the work was in agriculture, particularly crop agriculture. According to 1991 Labour Force Survey, 64 per cent of the labour force is engaged in this sector. It will continue to be so over the next two decades and more. But its capacity to absorb part of the incremental labour force will be on the decline as productivity gains displace many of the underemployed. Accelerated growth in the sector as well as in job-creation will be in high value horticulture, poultry and small livestock and fisheries.
With relevant agri-business support and contract growing to ensure regular supply of quality raw materials to keep the agro-processing industry running year round with a wide variety of vegetables and fruits, needs of the domestic urban markets can be met. Also the potential for export of semi-processed or processed product may even surpass the phenomenal growth of the garments industry. An obvious niche-market is the Asian community abroad.
Similarly, the urban implosion in Bangladesh can provide a large enough domestic market to permit setting up large scale poultry farms supporting entrepreneurs in the country side and ensuring sustainable livelihood for millions of women. A good example is the BRAC initiative. A number of modern large-scale farms supply one-day chicks to rural women entrepreneurs on a credit basis for rearing those between three and six months. The support services provided are proper housing units for the little ones with necessary feed and immunisation services. These entrepreneurs, then supply 15 hens and one cock to each of one million rural women, and they maintain their families with the sell of eggs in the local market.
The key to the whole programme is first the linkages among the three tiers, second the technology and training support including training of bare-foot veterinarians, and third provision of appropriate feed and shelter. Constraining factors are: i) high duties on vitamin, an essential ingredient of poultry feed and ii) as yet ad-hoc linkages with maize growers, maize being the basic feed. BRAC, however, has already entered into agreements with small farmers for growing maize and providing them hybrid-seed, by getting into seed-industry itself. The concomitant employment growth in seed-multiplication, retail trades and services in inputs, and contract growing itself is substantial.
Fruit processing like pineapple canning already initiated by some entrepreneurs and NGOs in Madhupur or dried food production, for example, also has considerable potential. If Bhutan could export mushrooms grown on oaks to Japan, there are enough opportunities for the same in the Chittagong Hill Tracts, a disturbed and disadvantaged region till today.
The rural non-farm sector, as an un-published World Bank document notes, particularly rural industry played stellar role in many of the high-growth East Asian economies in reinforcing agricultural performance. The best example is China and I plagiarise from the document, China 2020. Agricultural reforms, including household responsibility, price increases and the production increase that followed increased rural incomes substantially with concomitant high rural savings for investment in rural industries which generated better returns than farming. Higher agricultural productivity freed surplus labour on the land and provided a steady supply of workers for the rural industry, and higher rural incomes created a ready market for the industrial products. Further, these enterprise activities were supported by making agricultural raw materials available to rural enterprises for processing, and encouraging urban manufacturing farms to subcontract work to rural enterprises. "More generally", and I quote from the document, "production restrictions were relaxed, taxes were low and enterprises were allowed to pursue whatever activity they chose." Starting with 22 per cent of the country's total industrial output in 1978, the share of these rural enterprises reached 30 per cent by 1984 and climbed to 36 per cent in 1988.
Can such experience be replicated in the countryside in Bangladesh? My unequivocal answer is: Yes. One can only look at the once vanishing breed of impoverished hand-loom weavers in Bangladesh. Today, because of credit, marketing and technological support, including relevant dyes and design, they have found not only an expanded market within the country but also a niche-market abroad. Grameen check is the current craze in fashion design. What is required is expanding credit support, tapping domestic and overseas markets for new and traditional products, investing in physical and information infrastructure and training for skill development to compete in the global marketplace.
Coming back to the manufacturing sector, there is expanding employment opportunities in export-oriented manufacturing sector with a favourable policy environment and a liberalised trade regime in place. The momentum of export-oriented ready-made garments could be sustained with more value-added through cotton, jute and synthetic textiles. Leather processing and manufacturing, ceramic or electronic goods are all candidates for dynamic growth in the immediate future and beyond. An exciting prospect is in knowledge-intensive software production and data processing, offering a potentially significant employment opportunity for unemployed youths. The prerequisites, however, are language and computer training at secondary and tertiary levels along with infrastructural support through access via satellite communications, dedicated lines and collaboration with the large client base spread across the developed countries.
But I recall again the UNDP document that I started with. Export industries, however vibrant, could only employ a small section of the population. Bangladesh must generate its own internal dynamic to enhancework and income opportunities for the many. Currently around two-thirds of the people subsist on land. They must, in increasing proportion, make living in small industry or services like petty trading, selling compost by cart loads, rearing predators for controlling pests in the rice-field or vegetable patch and in more difficult circumstances by husking rice with 'dheki', breaking bricks for the urban, peri-urban roads and houses or pedalling rickshaws. They will certainly benefit from the stimulus of export industries. Women workers in the garment factories, for example, "may spend their days bent over whirring sewing machines, but these are women for whom income and independence open up fresh horizons outside the home." They are many. But how many? If Bangladesh "is not to be bifurcated into two nations - a smaller group that is linked to the globe, a larger one struggling in the margins"- the country has to find ways to promote small businesses that can employ the majority of the people.
The lending policy of large commercial banks support state-owned corporations or the privileged private corporate sector, many of whom default on their loans. Micro-credit extended by the NGOs has been and continues to be effective in enhancing income and employment opportunities for the poor and the least privileged.
Small enterprises and small business fall in between the two stools with rare investment support and non-existent access to information and knowledge resources. But this is where the opportunity for work and income for the majority population lies.
Beside the Grameen enterprise for the handloom and increasingly powerloom weavers, the only modest programme I know of is BRAC's credit and investment support to small entrepreneurs with a credit fund of ten crore taka and a relevant technology and management package. What is required perhaps is a facilitating framework within which small enterprises, trade and services can operate freely and efficiently.
No doubt, proliferation of small enterprises, trades and services is not a government responsibility. Creating an enabling environment, definitely is. Throwing open the windows of responsive governance and creating institutions that work less on the exercise of downward directed power and patronage and more on openness, transparency and accountability are essential for such facilitation. Finding ways to unleash the dormant creativity of the people and to equip them for a demanding future constitute the dancing horizon over the monsoon clouds of Bangladesh. And people, whether supported or not, will venture into "the sudden splendour of the dazzling light." (Rabindranath Tagore).
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