Why are we poor?

 

Liable to annual floods, natural disasters, and sudden calamities, Bangladesh's soil is all-rich for agriculture and agriculture is the mainstay of the rural economy embarking national economy. But agriculture has remained largely traditional, based on the vicious circle of low productivity, low production, low income, and low investment with resultant effects of il health, ill cloth, poor nutrition, and sanitation, etc., causing the degraded quality of life the overwhelming majority people.

With the triumph of much-talked and inflow of microcredit rural economy is still under subsistence level dominated by traditional usurious moneylenders. The rural economy has dual existence of small modern enclaves amidst traditional society and a small group of progressive, wealthy, and educated elites amidst masses of poor in abject poverty. The co-existence of such superior and inferior phenomena is not limited to the distribution of wealth, income, and power but also differentiate in the distribution of technological and comfortable amenities like electricity and other requirements for a quality life. Small enclaves of modern industries mostly urban manufacturing use modern imported capital intensive production methods to produce sophisticated products amidst traditional labor-intensive, small scale activities catering for limited local needs.

The geographical and geophysical location of Bangladesh on earth has made it very prone to natural disasters and calamities like floods, cyclones, tomato, drought, river erosion, and earthquake, and so on. Hence, Bangladesh's agriculture, rural and national economy, and way of like is locked by sudden severe catastrophes and damages every year.

1987, 1988, 1998, and this year, 2004 severe repeated floods devastated the whole economy, jeopardized daily life with prolonged sufferings causing damages to crops, livestock fisheries, infrastructures, roads, culverts, houses, and what not? However by evidence from bygone days, we are to live with natural disasters particularly we are to cope-up with fully uncontrollable floods and develop our agriculture, thriving rural economy, and prosper national economy. The vicious circle of poverty must somehow be breached immediately not in some far-off future and thereby become a developed nation.

The magic wad of development bears a fathomless gap in perceptions leading to different connotations even with misled hypotheses and large plans and projects.

Traditionally the role of agriculture in economic development has been viewed and largely passive and supportive. Based on the experiences of the western countries economic development was seen to require a rapid structural transformation of the economy from one predominantly focused on agricultural activities to more complex modern industrial and service societies. As a result agriculture's primary role was to provide sufficient low price food and manpower to the expending industrial economy which was thought to be the dynamic leading sector in the overall strategy of economic development. Arthur lewis's famous two-sector model is an outstanding example of a theory of development that gives heavy emphasis on rapid industrial growth with an agricultural sector fuelling the industrial expansion with its cheap food and surplus labor.

Today the development economists are less sanguine about the desirability of placing such heavy emphasis on rapid industrialization at the cost of agriculture. The 1970s have witnessed are remarkable transition in development thinking in which agricultural and rural development has been seen as the sine-qua-non of national development has been seen as the sine-qua-non of national development. Without such agricultural and rural development, industrial growth either be stultified or if it succeeds it creates such severe internal imbalances in the economy that the widespread poverty, inequality, unemployment, social crimes, political unrest, strikes, etc. become even more worsen. Hence economic development has been redefined in terms of the reduction or elimination of poverty, inequality, and unemployment within the context of a growing economy. Professor Dudley Seer posed the basic questions about a country's development such as what has been happening to poverty? What has been happening to unemployment? What has been happening to inequality? If all three of these have declined from high levels, beyond doubt he has been a period of development for the country concerned. If one or two of these central problems have been growing worse, especially. If all three have, it would be strange to call the resulting development even if per capita income doubled.

The radical changes

Among the other five main questions need to be asked for developing countries like Bangladesh agricultural and rural developments as these relate to overall national development:

1. How can total agricultural output and productivity per capita be substantially increased in a manner that will directly benefit the average small and marginal farmers and the landless rural dwellers that provide food support to a growing urban industrial sector?

2. What is the process by which traditional low productivity subsistence farms are transformed into high productivity commercial enterprise expanding SMEs as engines for economic growth.

3. Do traditionally small farmers and peasant cultivators stubbornly resist change or are they acting rationally within the context of their particular environment?

4. Are economic incentives sufficient to elicit output increase among peasant agriculturists or are institutional and structural changes in the rural farming system also required?

5. Is rising agricultural productivity sufficient to improve rural life or must there be concomitant improvements in educational medical and other social services? In other words, what do we mean by agricultural built-in rural development? And how it can be achieved?

Radical changes in agricultural transformation facilitated industrial development in western countries. The agricultural revolution of the 18th and 19th centuries brought about both an intensification of production and major alteration in the countryside's social organization. New methods of cultivation and fertilization resulted in steadily mounting the production of food. Thus in France, between 1780 and 1848 the amount of wheat doubled, wine production went up threefold and potatoes by 50 times. The availability of unused land benefited rural growth. In France, at the beginning of the 19th century 66 percent of land lay fallow but by 1850 half of these land got under the plow. Not wholly facetiously one might even trace this transformation to the introduction of the humble beet. Faced by blockade during the Napoleonic Wars, the governments of continental Europe promoted the cultivation of beetroots as a source of sugar. They did not fully anticipate that this would bring better rotation of other crops, more intensive methods, and more nutritious forage for cattle. While the causes differed and sometimes depended on accidents the 19th century did witness an unprecedented upsurge on food production on impossible to match in many of the contemporary developing regions. Without this increase, the shift of workers from the farms to the industry would not have been possible. An equally important change took place in the organization of agriculture in the UK in the USA less than 6 percent of the total workforce was agricultural compared with more than 70 percent in the early 19th century. For example, in 1820 the American farmers could produce only 4 times their own consumption. One hundred years later in 1920, their productivity doubled and the could provide enough for 8 persons. It took only another 32 years for their productivity to double again and the only 12 years more or them to double once more. By 1974 a single American farmer would provide enough food to feed almost 65 people. Moreover, during the entire period, the average farm income in North America was steadily rising.

The conceptual issues, problems, and solution package of agricultural and rural development must be related to the reality on the ground and not related to the IVORY TOWER conditions. The problem of small of scale operation of small and marginal means i.e. small and marginal farmers, assetless poor disadvantaged who are the backbone of the rural economy held for solution for many decades was collectivization of small resources as done in China and the former Soviet Union. The other one practiced in the capitalist world envisaging the rapid transformation of agriculture into a corporate system. Neither suits the rural poor of the third world. A solution is needed that reserve the private ownership of land at the same time it calls for the pooling of resources and their co-operative management at the village level. It does address itself to the needs of the small and marginal farmers in ways that led to permanent improvements of the smallholder's position in the society. More specifically, there is a need for a combination of principles and implementation methods that were employed successfully to organize the rural poor around their interests and to service these rural organizations in a permanent and profitable manner. The theoretical framework being extracted from the experiences of countries with flourishing smallholders in the agricultural sector.

Props for farm growth

These are the principles of Raiffeisen used with success in the institutionally based development of German agriculture. The Japanese pursued the same principles. In the period after the...