In My View

Prayer on their mind

The longest serving ‘caretaker’ government of Bangladesh is seeking to propitiate the rain-gods. Unlike their counterparts in various capitals of the region, they are not hoping that the rains would fall to cool the rising thermometer in these early summer months. On the contrary, they are pleading in their minds that the skies do not open up in the next fortnight – especially with a hailstorm.

Reason: the Boro crops of the season are ripening on the fields, almost ready to be harvested in the next fortnight. Only those crops could save the day for Bangladesh’s temporary administrators. For the price of rice has skyrocketed across the country in the past months, with it suffering severe shortages. Rice in Dacca is selling between 45-60 Takas.

And every morning thousands of people in the capital city are queuing up at shops run by the Bangladesh Rifles for buying subsidised rice at 25 Takas. A hailstorm now could change the scenario for the government more quickly than a Sheikh Hasina or Begum Khaleda would.

This, in a country whose agriculture is almost totally centred on growing paddy, is perplexing.  But such is the nature of IMF-World Bank driven ‘free market’ theology that Bangladesh government did not procure enough food grains last monsoon; hence did not have enough in stock. It is being said that the rice mill owners of the country did not sell their stocks to the government as its procurement prices were low. And more ludicrously it is now being decided that a fixed ‘levy’ would be imposed upon the rice mill owners during this Boro season so that they are compelled to sell now. If this is not the case of closing the barn door after the horse has bolted, what is?

Charges are being bandied about that hoarders are compounding the problem by not releasing their stocks in the market. Now, that too shows the naivete of an administration. Especially this from a government that claims to usher in Bangladesh a new style of nation-building, which would be a radical departure from the fractious and corrupt past of its previous political classes.

The rice mill owners, on the other hand, charge the government for not doing enough to increase agricultural yield that could solve the problem for the long term. They also say the traders are making hay as the shortage deepens.

In this milieu of charges and counter-charges the people of Bangladesh have little to live with. They do not even have a public distribution system by which they could access foodgrains for their survival. And they would not see the super-profits that would be made in the period for they have sold all they had produced much earlier to the rice mill owners at a rate that the mill owners fixed. All they can do now is to scramble to eke out a living.

But their anger would need venting. Unlike in the past, politically India is not being made a scapegoat of the situation. Many in Bangladesh believe, their current government lives by the rules of the USA and draw sustenance from the support of New Delhi. Yet, when the dam bursts, no one would be able to tell how the surging emotions would flow.

India would do well to take note of this developing situation in its East. The situation has only exacerbated due to the overall ban by New Delhi on non-Basmati rice export. It has closed the option of open market access by Bangladeshi traders. On top of that, as Bangladesh’s diplomats in Kolkata point out, when Pranab Mukherjee had visited the country in December last, there was talk of supplying Dacca with five lakh tonnes of rice. That was later whittled down to one lakh tonnes. Even the supply of that promised, and paltry amount, has not been done on an expedited basis. 

If New Delhi is counting its chickens even before the bilateral relationship between the two countries have hatched them, they would again be making the same myopic mistake of previous governments. Once the simmering anger of the people of Bangladesh finds India as its target, no subservience of any government would be able to contain the damage to neighbourly relations.

But how much can India do? Because India too has faced the brunt of the same neo-liberal policies that have addressed the politically safer demand side of the agricultural equation – because that made more quick money for the already wealthy – than the supply side. More than two decades of declining public investment in Indian agriculture is reaching the country to the throes of food deficiency.

For Bangladesh the situation is worse. Neither does it have the strong democratic institutions that could stop the country from pursuing a self-destructive economic path of unplanned and predatory capitalism. Nor does it have the economic muscle of an India – created over decades of planned growth and a vibrant public sector – to spend its way out of a crisis. At the end, one can safely say, the region would not emancipate itself politically like Latin America has done, till the whole Fund-Bank edifice collapses.

Pinaki Bhattacharya, currently located in Kolkata, is a Special Correspondent with the Mathrubhumi, Kerala. He writes on Strategic Security issues. He can be contacted at pinaki63@dataone.in