During the last two decades the economy of Bangladesh achieved a modest and reasonably steady annual rate of growth of GDP of just over four per cent. While allowing a significant reduction in the incidence of poverty, this growth rate has failed to prevent a widening of the disparity in the living standard between Bangladesh and the rest of developing Asia including South Asia. Furthermore, the rate of poverty reduction halted, at least for a period, after the mid 1980s and the social indicators of development of Bangladesh have progressed at a far slower rate than that of developing Asia. There was an early rise in the rate of investment until 1980/81. Thereafter, it went into decline and prolonged stagnation before returning to the previous peak level. The rate of saving, though much higher in the early 1990s than in the late 1970s, is still very low even by the standard of the low-income developing countries. Exports have grown reasonably rapidly, but the composition of exports still remains rather undiversified and the most rapidly rising components of exports have grown under the protection of quotas in importing OECD countries and their value added and net foreign exchange earnings have been a very small proportion of their gross values. Bangladesh has implemented a substantial program of economic reform which has failed to improve the growth performance of the economy. This was mainly due to the exclusive focus of reforms on promoting allocative efficiency and the failure to replace the (distorted) pre-reform system of incentives by an alternative system of incentives for production and investment. An understanding of the nature and manifestations of this imbalance is an essential precondition for the formulation of development policies to overcome the phenomenon of slow growth and poor human development.

The shape of development in the medium to long-term is most likely to be influenced in a significant way by the dynamics of food grain demand-supply balance in the country. A consistent framework for projection of medium and long-term demand and supply of food grains in Bangladesh has, therefore, been developed in this paper. The analysis involves a prospective view of future demand for rice and wheat, and the growth of food grain production, particularly rice under increasing resource constraints. Alternative projections of food grain supply, demand and trade balance in year 2000 and beyond (upto year 2020) are presented in the paper. The exercise demonstrates that Bangladesh is expected to produce, under favorable conditions, enough rice to meet domestic demand, but would be unable to export regular varieties of rice due to its inability to generate surplus at a internationally competitive price. the prospect of export of arommatic varieties of rice, however, seems quite encouraging. Import of wheat (ranging between about one million ton in 2000 to about two million tons in 2020) will need to continue. The policy implications of alternative projection scenario have been spelt out in the paper.

Over the past 25 years, Bangladesh’s targeted food programmes have varied substantially in the commodities distributed, seasons of operation, and targeting mechanisms. This paper attempts to generalize from this broad programming experience by using a seasonal multi-market model to analyze the consequences of existing and hypothetical programme designs. Analysis points to several design features increasing monetization of wheat followed by cash payments to workers, particularly in Food for Work; more attention to the timing of income and wheat supply injections; and continued targeting of female-headed households-that offer potential gains in programme efficiency, target group incomes, and calorie consumption of the poor.