The Foundation for Agrarian Studies (FAS), a think-tank in India, celebrated its 10th anniversary just a few days back. To mark the occasion, a conference on agrarian relations and agricultural crisis was organised by the FAS. Eminent social scientists of India and abroad as well as down-to-earth agricultural labour leaders, with their experiences on the ground, graced the occasion in Kochin from January8-12. Especially the participants (Comrades) from South Africa, Cuba, Venezuela, Vietnam and China added further attraction to the meeting since one could glean views on laudable land reforms pursued by those economies and the impacts thereof. From the Bangladesh side, fortunately, this writer had to represent Dr Mahabub Hossain. By any stretch of imagination and standard, it was a conference of a tall order - both in terms of coverage and contents.
Readers may be reminded that the nexus between agrarian relations and agrarian crisis once used to dominate the discourse in Bangladesh. It was in the 1970s when a group of influential researchers reasoned that the agrarian structure would constrain development of productive forces in Bangladesh's agriculture. The hypothesis still is there but in a very limited space. Wittingly, the proponents of the hypothesis have seemingly gone with the wind.
But in India, the hypothesis still haunts. The reasons are possibly not far to seek: a growing number of suicides by farmers over time, falling profitability especially in crop production, mayhem of 'landlordism' followed by eviction of tenants and a panoply of painful policy twists under the aegis of neo-liberalism. Allegedly, neo-liberalism has opened up the door for differential impacts of policies on peasants who are already faced with growing differentiation in the agrarian structure. The solution to the crisis that is now crippling the Indian agriculture - as argued by the scholars and activists - would come only through mass movements against the forces at the root of the crisis - metaphorically meaning a red revolution in place of a green revolution!.
Coming to the hypothesis of differentiation, Bangladesh has never witnessed 'landlordism' in its true sense of the term. What we observed in fact is the presence of a group of large and medium farmers owning two hectare and above land. It is true that this class had a heyday till early 1990s but their whipping has waned, if not wiped out, over time. In 1988, for example, 8 per cent of rural households owned land above two hectares and the share of land under their command was about 42 per cent of the total. Just two decades later, the share stood respectively at 4 and 31 per cent. On the contrary, the proportion of households owning up to 0.4 ha (1 acre) went up from 25 per cent to 42 per cent. In fact, the groups owning 0.4 ha or more witnessed a decline both in terms of share of households and proportion of land under command. The average size of owned land per household dropped from 0.61 to 0.48 ha over the period under consideration. Interestingly, when pitted against farm size, the situation shows no discernible difference as the share of households cultivating lands in the range of 0.2 to 0.40 ha has shot up from 35 per cent to 52 per cent in a span of two decades only; the average size of holding stood at 0.56 ha from 0.87 ha in 1988. Thus while the rationale behind a fair distribution of khas lands among landless households can be on board with confidence that of a drastic land reform would possibly beg some big questions (a situation where everyone gets poorer!).
Of course, landlordism in its classical connotation prevails where the vast tracts of agricultural land - averaging say 30-40 acres or more - are owned by a class of farmers called 'kulaks' in the village who cling mostly to commercial cultivation under own management. Interlinked market, forced sell-out of labour, tenant eviction, usury capital etc are features of the system. In Bangladesh, however, large and medium farmers have in a great deal switched off to relatively more remunerative non-farm activities leaving their lands to the tenants. About 45 per cent of cultivated land is rented and most of the tenants are functionally landless households or erstwhile agricultural labourers. The tenancy condition has also changed from exploitative and unproductive sharecropping of the past to fixed-rent system or leasing arrangements of the present. A further impetus came from tightening of the labour market in rural areas with almost non-existence of attached workers, gradual decline in daily wage labour paving way for contractual arrangements. The daily agricultural wage rate in many villages is now 10 kg worth of rice. In fact, 80-90 per cent of planting and harvesting is now done by contract labour - a phenomenon hardly of such height in the past. To conclude, it is not differentiation but pauperisation that seemingly captures the scenario in prevailing agrarian structure. From the twist of policies, these small and marginal groups (70 per cent of cultivators) reap home the due reward. Remember that Upen in Rabindranath Tagore's celebrated poem 'Dui bigha jomi' (two bighas of land) had to face acute food insecurity, not to speak of the exploitation from his money lender 'babu'. In Bangladesh today, the Upens grow modern varieties in their tiny parcels to fetch 16-20 maunds of paddy per bigha as opposed to 2-4 maunds from earlier varieties. Real wages of labour are rising and water market has become competitive. The NGOs provide credit at 27 per cent interest rate per annum as opposed to 100-120 per cent by mohajons. To be focused on this last point, one-thirds of rural households accessed credit from non-institutional sources in 1988 that now stands at 10 per cent. Forty per cent of the functionally landless households now access credit from NGOs compared to a paltry 4 per cent in 1988. In other words, new technology, expansion of rural networks through roads and availability of micro-credit have been giving rise to non-farm activities that, to a great extent, has reduced the role of land as a source of income . The share of paddy farming now accounts for roughly 20 per cent in total household income as opposed to 37 per cent in the past. The share of agricultural wage income has almost halved. Further, Upens' household size has declined from 6.1 to 4.6; average education has gone up 1.5 years of schooling to 3.4 years; 90 per cent of school-going girls from their households go to school; non-agricultural capital grew from $52 to $200 (total capital from $161 to $372) over the comparable periods. Needless to mention perhaps that the accumulation of the large and medium households ran at a faster pace the Upens to result in inequality in rural areas.
But that is neither to argue that agrarian crisis is over nor to show that Bangladeshi Upens are living in the light. The point to ponder is that livelihoods of rural poor are driven more by physical and human capital than land endowment although land ownership dictates the degree of accumulation of non-land assets. It is a discernible drift from the past. The occupational mobility from farm to non-farm activities has helped them with economic uplift. They are out of the shadow of 'exposed famine' both from availability and entitlement point of view. Assuming human capital continues to grow, Upens' future generations are likely to live much longer than now. But while saying so, one also needs to note that the crisis in Bangladesh's agriculture is of different kind such as loss of cultivable land by 1 per cent per annum; rising input costs adducible especially to rising agricultural wages, more often than not the terms of trade moving against farmers, climate change casting a gloom on yield rate etc.
By and large, while a green revolution in Bangladesh has apparently stopped the red revolution, contrarily, the rise of a red revolution is thought to be threatening India today. That is to say, two distinctly different outcomes have resulted from the same prescription.
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The writer is a Professor of Economics at Jahangirnagar University.
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