Geof Wood, 
M. A. Sattar Mandal               

Following two papers published in the Review of Agrarian Studies in 2022 and presentations of these to a BIDS seminar and the ABCD Conference in 2023, BIDS allocated funds under its Research Endowment Fund (REF) for a scoping study on ‘The Political Economy of Agrarian Futures’, starting in mid-2023. Wood and Mandal also wrote a piece for the Daily Star in May 2024.   

Since then, 10+ sites (or social labs) have been visited for the qualitative scoping study in order to triangulate opening assumptions and hypotheses and enable a preliminary understanding of how the agrarian system is developing in the country, and therefore how it might look over the next couple of decades. The case for this research initiative is twofold: first, policy for the country (profitable agriculture and food security in particular) relies upon understanding the effects of ongoing capital and technology intrusion into agriculture on the structure of farms (farm size and fragmentation), organization of production (self-cultivation, leasing/tenancy, contractors) and social structure/arrangements through which production, processing and marketing take place; and secondly while much has been written about production changes in agriculture (land productivity, labour demand, and technology adoption ) little attention has been given to the agrarian political economy in terms of changing relationships between land, labour and capital, entailing a redistribution of returns, and thus productivity, livelihoods, from agriculture with different patterns of gains, losses and opportunities emerging. These emerging patterns underpin new sets of interests in political terms. 

This twofold rationale matters because while agriculture as a proportion of GDP has declined to 11 per cent(GoB, 2020), agricultural output has quadrupled since independence, indicating significant advances in productivity  of land and labour, especially as a crude estimate of labour flight from agriculture in the decade up to 2020 is given as 17 million(GoB, 2020; Ifaz, 2021), with agricultural labour declining as a proportion of the nation’s labour force from 47 per cent to 39 per cent, but still significant(GoB, 2018). Meanwhile, up to 70 per cent of country’s population remains rural in some sense, though with rurbanisation , fluid migration patterns stimulated by physical and virtual infrastructure, and non-rural as well as non-farm employment, mindsets are becoming more urban-oriented. Rising income levels, both urban and from increases in real rural wage rates as well as international remittances, have fueled visible changes in lifestyles, including improvement in housing conditions. But not equally for everyone. A redistribution of returns from cultivation carries the risk of rising inequalities alongside changing patterns of inequality. We should also note that contained within the ‘futures’ problematic is the advancing challenges of climate change especially in the coastal belt, but also in upper riverine areas of the North-West (NW) as well as the Haor area of the North-East (NE).

Essentially, in the following analysis, we argue that the family ‘peasant’ farm in Bangladesh is destined to disappear due to the steady intrusion of capital into the mode of agricultural production. The family farm as an integral social unit interlocking land, labour and capital is becoming internally unlocked (disarticulated), as other capital-owning actors appear in the agricultural system and as land is increasingly cultivated by contractors and tenants with owners becoming rentiers. Hence, the relationship between land, labour and capital becomes relocked (rearticulated) at other levels of aggregation in the system via processes of commodification, including for labour.

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