Why Deb is wrong

Last September I met Dr. Debapriya Bhattarcharya in Paris. For those of you who don’t know, he is Bangladesh’s new ambassador to the World Trade Organization in Geneva and formerly executive director of the respected Dhaka-based think tank, the Centre for Policy Dialogue.

We were both attending an informal experts’ meeting on aid effectiveness and I was pleased to see Bangladesh represented by two of its best: Deb himself and Mahfuz Anam, editor of The Daily Star newspaper.

During downtime cruising on the Seine, I picked Deb’s brain on a variety of topics until our conversation turned to food security. For my part, I was worried that the progress Bangladesh had made to emerge from the shadow of famine in the 1970s was at risk of being lost. My reasons? There are several that I have become aware of since the early 1990s, when I used to work in Bangladesh on forestry and ecological agriculture issues. They include, for instance, relentless urban expansion, land fragmentation, topsoil erosion, soil nutrient depletion, saline penetration in the south, growing aridity in the north, and so on. While Bangladesh might produce about 29 million tons of food grain a year now, the factors I’ve just mentioned might actually see a reverse of this growth in the future. I wondered what our new ambassador had to say about this.

Perhaps I caught him off guard because his answer sounded a little too off-the-cuff. “We’ll import,” he replied. His reasons? Bangladesh’s economy has been growing at a healthy rate of over five per cent a year for several years. He’s right. Goldman Sachs counts the country as among its ‘Next Eleven’ list, the group of countries that show signs of becoming new centres of economic growth over the next several years. Deb went on to argue that, as the economy grew, more people would turn away from agriculture into urban industrial and service sectors. Bangladesh would be able to afford to import more of the food necessary to sustain its population.

With all due respect to the Ambassador, I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. Here are several reasons why his reasoning is wrong:

1. The increase in food prices is not a phenomenon limited to Bangladesh. The sort of growth celebrated by economists is increasing demand and changing consumption patterns. More people now want to eat meat, which requires more grain to produce, thus displacing production of grain as a staple for both domestic consumption and export.

2. Patterns of development that emphasize urban industrial interests have seen a disinvestment, or at least de-emphasis, in agricultural research and development.

3. The price of fuel has increased for a variety of reasons and this has been transferred onto both producers and consumers of agricultural products.

4. The charge towards biofuels is proving to be unsustainable at various levels. Biofuels are thirsty crops and displace food crops, thus creating a double whammy of environmental and economic costs.

5. The effects of climate change will affect food exporting zones drastically within our lifetimes. We will see the effects of this first in terms of the rising price of grain exports and then a secular decline in the level of production as rainfall patterns and seasonal variations in temperature change. To illustrate the point, Australia lost almost a year of wheat due to drought, according to Katie Dean, an economist at ANZ Bank in Sydney.

I could go on. Unfortunately, none of these real world factors seemed to enter into Deb’s calculations. What struck me is how his position reflected an old world order, where the championing of the economic would enhance the public good. We know this is not the case. As I have argued elsewhere on East of the Equator, there is a real danger in the way economists seek to order human and natural phenomena through the narrow optic of economics. It presents a cock-eyed perspective full of blind spots.

One such blind spot is history. Deb’s brave new world of a growing, industrialized Bangladesh might be closer to the Goldman Sachs thesis but it ignores what happens to societies that industrialize. Consider this: there has been not one instance of a society going through an industrial revolution while being a democracy. Britain in the 1840s was not a democracy. The Soviet Union in the 1930s was not a democracy. South Korea in the 1960s and 1970s was not a democracy. Then there is the human cost: agrarian society demolished; disease and dislocation caused by internal displacement; external migration (about one third of Sweden’s population emigrated in the 19th century owing to a combination of industrialization and famine). No wonder in India, which is a democracy, industrial giants Tata are having such a tough time displacing local people in the district of Singur for their new industrial plant.

I am impressed that Bangladesh has been able to appoint an economist of Deb’s stature as chief of mission in Geneva. I admire the positions he has taken against the IMF and the World Bank. Bangladesh could do with more people who speak from well-founded substantive positions to protect and promote the national interest. But on the questions of long-term food security and the place of agrarian society within a ‘modern’ Bangladesh, I am afraid that Deb is wrong.