Starving those who save us from hunger

The famous Russian writer Leo Tolstoy, regarded as one of the greatest authors of all time, at the peak of his success over 100 years ago, had succumbed to a profound spiritual crisis. The existential crisis of his inner life led to the creation of his autobiographical memoir — A Confession — where he asks his all-important question: "what is the meaning of life, if any"?

After a long and desperate search, he claimed to have discovered his solution not in science, philosophy or the life of hedonism, but in those living life in its simplest and purest form. Tolstoy writes, "If I wished to live and understand the meaning of life, I must seek this meaning not among those who have lost it…but among those milliards of the past and the present who make life and who support the burden of their own lives and of ours also" — i.e. the farmers.

Bangladesh is a country renowned for its fertile land. This is because alluvial soil deposited by its interconnected rivers when they overflow their banks.

Thus, agriculture is naturally its largest employment sector, employing 47 percent of the total labour force and comprising 16 percent of the country's GDP, as of 2016. Similar to in Tolstoy's Russia, Bangladeshi farmers too have, for decades, "laboured quietly, endured deprivations and sufferings, and lived and died seeing therein not vanity but good". All the while, quietly transforming Bangladesh from Henry Kissinger's "basket case", to a country which today, produces enough food to feed its own (massive) population — a fantastic achievement by any standard of measurement, albeit underappreciated, if at all recognised.

With one of the fastest rates of productivity growth in the world since 1995 (averaging 2.7 percent per year, second only to China) according to the World Bank, the agricultural sector has accounted for 90 percent of Bangladesh's poverty reduction between 2005 and 2010. The lion's share of credit for which, undeniably belongs to the small farmers, as according to the Bangladesh Bureau of Statistics (BBS) for FY 2014-15, out of the approximately 15 million farms, "84 percent are on average between 0.05 to 2.49 acres and 52 percent are between 0.05 to 0.99 acres" of land.

And yet, it is not the small farmers who have been the main beneficiaries of their blood, toil, sweat and tears. Rather, the main beneficiaries have been those that Tolstoy warned us not to become — the "parasites". That is, either the middlemen, or the (not exclusively) local politicians and influential people.

A perfect example of this surfaced only recently in Mokrompur union in Habiganj's Baniachang upazila, when farmers there who were left devastated by an environmental disaster alleged that they were denied government aid — Vulnerable Group Feeding (VGF) rice — specifically allocated for them. Meanwhile, relatives of the union parishad chairman collected the VGF rice meant for the farmers instead, and sold it in the open market for profit, according to reports.

This is nothing new, of course, but is indicative of an old problem that simply refuses to go away. One pointed out a long time ago by an individual whose life was profoundly affected by Tolstoy's work, named Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi.

In a speech delivered on February 4, 1916, in British controlled-undivided India (which included Bangladesh at the time), Gandhi said: "Whenever I hear of a great palace rising in any great city of India ruled by our great chiefs, I become jealous at once and say, 'Oh, it is the money that has come from the agriculturalists.' There cannot be much spirit of self-government about us, if we take away or allow others to take away from the peasants almost the whole of the results of their labour. Our salvation can only come through the farmer. Neither the lawyers, nor the doctors, nor the rich landlords are going to secure it" (The Life of Mahatma Gandhi, Louis Fischer).

Unfortunately, looking around at the state of things today only makes one realise just how miserably we have neglected his advice and, in the process, failed to find our salvation and spirit of self-government (ensure social equality, justice and freedom). Thus, we simply take what the farmers of our country provide us with, for granted. Never even bothering to help them out when they are left helpless by environmental disasters and are starving, let alone realise that we would go hungry each and every day of our life, if it wasn't for their daily sacrifices.

However, the greatest irony of it all is perhaps something that economist Michael Hudson mentions in his book Killing the Host. That is, like every other parasite, what the modern day economic 'parasites' don't realise is that by slowly leeching off the host and eventually killing it, they are only guaranteeing their own death. Because at the end of the day, the survival of the parasite actually depends on the host, not the other way around.

The writer is a member of the Editorial team at The Daily Star.