Rentiers and Contractors: The Future of Agrarian Bangladesh Part 2: The Disappearance of the Bangladeshi Farm?

Part 1 of this two-part paper was subtitled “The Agrarian Transition Since Liberation” and focused upon the agrarian legacy of the region, the post-liberation engagement with the overwhelming issue of food security, and the contrast between land reform measures in neighbouring India and market driven processes of agrarian change in Bangladesh. It drew attention to heterogeneity in land holding and class relations in contrast to the liberation narrative of a homogenous nation of small independent farmers. The purpose in Part 2 is to advance a hypothesis about the disarticulation of the Bangladeshi farm in all its forms, and the re-articulation of the agrarian system via services and capital investment (entailing both rurbanisation and new forms of class relations). The hypothesis occurs within three possible agrarian trajectories for Bangladesh. One possible trajectory envisages a continuation of the family farm as petty commodity producers bringing inputs into their self-cultivated scattered plots, selling a net marketable surplus, if and after family consumption needs are met. A second possible trajectory is of large-scale commercial farms using large-scale equipment oriented entirely to producing for a national and even global market. But thirdly, we suggest that there is a specifically Bangladeshi hybrid, combining ongoing attachment to land but with owners and tenants becoming rentiers, de facto leasing out their scattered plots for consolidated operation and efficiency gains to commercially provided agricultural services, led by irrigation technologies. Given heterogeneity of land tenure, including a new class of small tenants using remittances and income from other sources to access land, such services are provided at two levels of significance: larger more commercialised contractors; and local service providers-cum-cultivators renting out surplus capacity (e.g. hand held power tillers, four-wheel tractors, and irrigation pump sets) to neighbours. The paper then considers the wider context contributing to these processes of disarticulation, identifying key accelerations in rural infrastructure and decentralised administration, new input supply chains, expansion of urban employment, and urbanisation itself, growth of overseas labour opportunities and remittances, and the blurring of rural and urban habitat through rurbanisation. It concludes by noting the social, rent-seeking aspect of the relationships associated with this steady intrusion of capital into agriculture, retaining clientelism, and local monopolies in the creation and management of supply chains (for inputs and produce), alongside the partial commodification of agricultural labour as family labour recedes. It speculates on the structural implications of incorporating these new agrarian and rurban elites into the body politic.