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Equitable distribution of lands needed
Dhaka, Thursday, August 21, 2003
The News Today

Experts have pleaded for land reforms as big farmers have virtually marginalized their smaller counterparts and made 58 per cent rural households landless.
While appreciating their ceaseless efforts to grow more food, the experts said public policies and political parties have largely neglected the interests of hard-working men behind the ploughs.

They made the observations at a conference organized by the Center for Policy Dialogue (CPD), a leading think-tank, in Dhaka on Wednesday on the occasion of publishing a report on human development in South Asia.

“Land reforms need serious consideration,” said Dr. Asaduzzaman, research director of the Bangladesh Institute of Development Studies (BIDS). He was one of the members of a panel that wrote the human development report. As the prime factor of production, land is being exhausted with the passage of time, said Dr Asaduzzaman. That is why, he said, an ‘equitable redistribution of lands’ is required to maintain the pace of agricultural development that the sector had in the past decades.

Binayek Sen, a senior research fellow of the BIDS, said parliamentarians own huge lands in rural Bangladesh and therefore, they would not be interested in land reforms. However, he said, some public lands known as khas lands, now lying under government control and shoals (newly-emerged lands in rivers) could be distributed among the landless.

While discussing the human development report, many participants questioned authenticity of data used in it while some challenged the outcome of ‘green revolution’ that connoted breakthrough in farming two decades ago.
“Green revolution was more or less green, and was able to raise farm yield to a certain extent,” said Dr Asaduzzaman defending the revolution. “However, its outcome was not as much as it was expected,” he said adding that the income distribution due to green revolution was inequitable.

Another economist said green revolution was mere a propaganda of the U.S which sought to effectively block communist resurgence in Asia, Africa and Latin America.
Proponents of green revolution held the view that it brought more lands under disciplined cultivation resulting in more yield. Prof. Rehman Sobhan, who chaired the discussion, said such report should have dealt with impact of globalisation on local small farmers and consequences of trade liberalization on the national economy.