Rentiers and Contractors: The Future of Agrarian Bangladesh Part 1: The Agrarian Transition Since Liberation

This is the first of a two-part paper tracking agrarian change in Bangladesh, especially since its liberation in 1971. Part 1 briefly traces agrarian relations in the East Bengal delta from the Permanent Settlement in 1793, in order to establish the legacy of colonial feudalism for the social structure of the region, a legacy partially shared with West Bengal and across the Bengal Presidency more widely. This legacy of sub-infeudation via a hierarchy of revenue-collecting tenure holders and petty landlords receiving rents from occupancy tenants (the peasantry) acted as a depressor upon agricultural productivity, thus setting the conditions for food insecurity and famine. This understanding, however, is distorted by the “liberation narrative” that dominated western scholarship, of a nation of small farmers that was exploited and stayed underdeveloped during the Pakistan period. This small farmer narrative was aided by action-research during the 1960s that started a programme of small farmer cooperatives in the Dhaka–Cumilla belt, a region of high soil fertility, a dense population, with minifundist or small farm holdings. In order to enhance food security post-liberation, the intent of the state was to extend the small farmer model to the rest of the country. This approach ignored the emerging evidence of the capture of cooperatives by the rich, as it did the larger context of quasi-feudalism and widespread landlessness in rural Bangladesh. The paper introduces the notion of “squared fragmentation” with plots, not just land area, divided between inheriting sons, inhibiting consolidation and thereby also inhibiting methods to optimise new technologies, especially mechanisation and the introduction of new, higher-yielding rice varieties (irri-boro). These conditions set the scene for the intrusion of capital into agriculture via contract farming, opening up the possibility of landholders becoming rentiers on plots operated by other stakeholders rather than themselves becoming commercial farmers. This proposition is explored further in Part 2, suggesting that Bangladesh represents a distinctive model of agrarian reform in contrast to more familiar land reform measures elsewhere in the subcontinent.