Poverty, Resource Distribution and Security: The Impact of New Agricultural Technology in Rural Bangladesh

Increasing inequality in use of land and of access to natural resources essential for the success of modern agricultural techniques can be expected to increase inequality in rural income distribution, especially if the number of landless or near-landless rises and their real per capita income either falls or remains constant. This chapter provides evidence of increasing concentration of use and control of agricultural land in Bangladesh, and of increasing inequality in the ownership of ancillary resources such as irrigation water, essential for the success of the bulk of Green Revolution technologies. Increasing landlessness and near-landlessness is making the Bangladeshi rural poor more dependent on wage employment for their subsistence. How the poor fare in these circumstances depends in the main on the availability of wage employment and the real level of wages. In this regard, A.R. Khan (1984, p.192) found that despite some short-term recovery due to rapid output growth, the long-term trend in agricultural wages is negative. Slow growth in agricultural productivity is one of the major factors explaining the negative trend in real wages. Khan identified (p.194–5) four long-term factors which tended to depress real agricultural wages in Bangladesh during the 1949–82 period: (1) declining land-man ratio; (2) continued inequality in the distribution of land; (3) the prevalence of institutions and techniques which discouraged increased on-farm employment; and (4) slow growth in off-farm employment. In an earlier study, R. Islam (1979) found evidence of increased poverty and inequality in terms of falling real wages and increased concentration of land resources.