Poverty and landlessness go hand in hand
Friday, 21 September 2007
Ashraful Hasan
BANGLADESH economy still has a largely agrarian feature with the greater part of the population remaining tied to agriculture and living in the rural areas. The economy has diversified a great deal over the last two decades. However, notwithstanding industrialization and growth of services, agriculture continues to be the single biggest source of sustenance, income and earning for the preponderant majority of the population. The ownership of land or control over it continues to be a very important concern for those dependent on such ownership or the relationship between poverty and worsening of poverty with landlessness is an umbilical one.
Land ownership has been fragmenting and individual ownership of land getting smaller from population growth and division of land between successors. The growingly smaller size of the plots is also considered to be less helpful for feasibly introducing mechanized cultivation and application of other advanced techniques. Nonetheless, the millions of tiny plots dotting the rural areas are considered to be assets by their owners who are also safeguarded from worse form of poverty descending on them from owning even small parcels of land and subsisting somehow from the same.
Landless people usually drift towards cities and tend to create problems of congestion, squalor and other negatives there. To keep the cities livable or in decent conditions, the migration of the very poor from landlessness should be frustrated by different means. Policies should be in operation to control the tendency towards landlessness at the points of origin meaning the rural areas. A survey conducted by the official Bangladesh Bureau of Statistics (BBS) found out that total percentage of landlessness in the country comprising both rural and urban areas was 48.9 per cent in the year 2000, which came down 40.0 per cent in 2005. However, some 56 million out of the total population of the country remain in the landless category still, and this is a huge number.
Landlessness must not be seen absolutely as a liability because landlessness need not be counted as leading to total hopelessness and economic misery in all cases. Many people on ceasing to be farmers, succeed in trades, services , small manufacturing and other occupations . But the stark reality for the greatest number of the landless usually is worst poverty. Therefore, there are compelling reasons to keep landlessness in check. Only adoption of appropriate policies and their applications in a concerted manner will contribute to this end.
First of all, the real reasons that encourage landlessness should be identified and addressed. It needs realization that landlessness or the voluntary or pressurized sale of land occurs mainly under very distressful conditions of the victims such as during crop failures, lawlessness enabling the mighty local thugs to forcefully dispossess simple people of their lands, natural calamities, etc. The introduction of rural insurance can be an answer alongside a legislation that would restrict or make difficult sale of land under distressed conditions. Institutional loans at nominal rates of interest should be available to the rural poor during such specially difficult situations. Integrated anti-poverty strategies and programmes should be pursued so that sustainable improvements in the lives conditions of the poor become possible and they do not have to slide back to the worst form of poverty in a particularly difficult year.
The government should also have an active policy of settling the landless in the khaas (government-owned) lands and in the lands now being formed in the coastal areas through accretion. Settlement in the accreted land can be carried out only after some preparatory works designed to consolidate these newly formed lands and make them secure for human settlement. In all of these areas, the government should have not only policies on paper but should execute the policies in the right earnest without a pause for them to be of real value.
BANGLADESH economy still has a largely agrarian feature with the greater part of the population remaining tied to agriculture and living in the rural areas. The economy has diversified a great deal over the last two decades. However, notwithstanding industrialization and growth of services, agriculture continues to be the single biggest source of sustenance, income and earning for the preponderant majority of the population. The ownership of land or control over it continues to be a very important concern for those dependent on such ownership or the relationship between poverty and worsening of poverty with landlessness is an umbilical one.
Land ownership has been fragmenting and individual ownership of land getting smaller from population growth and division of land between successors. The growingly smaller size of the plots is also considered to be less helpful for feasibly introducing mechanized cultivation and application of other advanced techniques. Nonetheless, the millions of tiny plots dotting the rural areas are considered to be assets by their owners who are also safeguarded from worse form of poverty descending on them from owning even small parcels of land and subsisting somehow from the same.
Landless people usually drift towards cities and tend to create problems of congestion, squalor and other negatives there. To keep the cities livable or in decent conditions, the migration of the very poor from landlessness should be frustrated by different means. Policies should be in operation to control the tendency towards landlessness at the points of origin meaning the rural areas. A survey conducted by the official Bangladesh Bureau of Statistics (BBS) found out that total percentage of landlessness in the country comprising both rural and urban areas was 48.9 per cent in the year 2000, which came down 40.0 per cent in 2005. However, some 56 million out of the total population of the country remain in the landless category still, and this is a huge number.
Landlessness must not be seen absolutely as a liability because landlessness need not be counted as leading to total hopelessness and economic misery in all cases. Many people on ceasing to be farmers, succeed in trades, services , small manufacturing and other occupations . But the stark reality for the greatest number of the landless usually is worst poverty. Therefore, there are compelling reasons to keep landlessness in check. Only adoption of appropriate policies and their applications in a concerted manner will contribute to this end.
First of all, the real reasons that encourage landlessness should be identified and addressed. It needs realization that landlessness or the voluntary or pressurized sale of land occurs mainly under very distressful conditions of the victims such as during crop failures, lawlessness enabling the mighty local thugs to forcefully dispossess simple people of their lands, natural calamities, etc. The introduction of rural insurance can be an answer alongside a legislation that would restrict or make difficult sale of land under distressed conditions. Institutional loans at nominal rates of interest should be available to the rural poor during such specially difficult situations. Integrated anti-poverty strategies and programmes should be pursued so that sustainable improvements in the lives conditions of the poor become possible and they do not have to slide back to the worst form of poverty in a particularly difficult year.
The government should also have an active policy of settling the landless in the khaas (government-owned) lands and in the lands now being formed in the coastal areas through accretion. Settlement in the accreted land can be carried out only after some preparatory works designed to consolidate these newly formed lands and make them secure for human settlement. In all of these areas, the government should have not only policies on paper but should execute the policies in the right earnest without a pause for them to be of real value.