Small farming, urbanisation and climate migration: beyond the stereotypes in Bangladesh

Problem: how to keep this blog ticking over while I write my book.

Solution: another guest post

Much as I abhor nepotism, sometimes there’s nothing like family when it comes to getting you out of a hole. So I’m pleased to bring you the piece below from my son Jake, based around the research he’s doing with small-scale farmers in Bangladesh as part of his PhD at the London School of Economics. Over to Jake –

Bangladesh is a small country that sits within the Northeast of South Asia with India wrapped around it, and Myanmar to the South. Despite its small size and relatively recent independence, Bangladesh plays an oversized role in the way poverty, development, climate change and urbanisation are imagined globally.

Often in discussions of climate change the conversation turns to Bangladesh as a country imagined to be sinking, throwing out waves of climate migrants across the world. For many reasons this vision is wrong. I don’t have space to go into this in depth here (see further references below). Instead, I want to tell a different but connected story about Bangladesh, urbanisation and the environment. One that seeks to elevate the kind of conversations I have had with Bangladeshi people in years of travelling to and working in Bangladesh.

When I tell people I study rural to urban migration within Bangladesh people often either talk about climate migration or discuss what a relief it must be for these people to leave agriculture and move to the city where they imagine the quality of life to be better. This agrarian escape narrative invokes remarks by Joel Scott-Halkes in saying “Eighty percent of food may come from peasant farmers, but most of them have awful, awful lives, they hate being small farmers, it’s crushing, they die in their 50s, they would absolutely love not to be small farmers”.

In one sense this narrative is right, it’s very hard being a small farmer, but in an arguably more important sense it’s wrong, many people pushed out of farming desperately desire to return, and this is the driving force of their life while they are in cities. Scott-Halkes’ assertions could be reworded like this: “Eighty percent of food may come from peasant farmers, but most of them have awful lives, they find it hard to make a livelihood from farming, this is crushing, so they move to cities and struggle to make a living, it’s also crushing, they would absolutely love to be able to be a small farmer and to make a living if they could”.

To find an explanation for this one needs to look at broader structural factors, like international political economy, which put pressure on poor people in both rural and urban spaces, as well as more local, culturally situated desires, preferences and relationships to place. In my experience it is not as simple as rural bad, and city good, but instead the preferences of people worldwide are informed by local, national and international influences that make generalities about what whole groups of people like small farmers want a dangerous and futile leap of faith. What people coming from agrarian spaces say they want frequently cuts against the conventional wisdom in the West.

In Bangladesh, a culture around agriculture and place-attachment often draws people to farming, yet a complex global and local political economy pushes them off the land towards the cities. So, it’s more complex than the oversimplified narrative of the impoverished and immiserated farmer favoured by ecomodernists. I’m not going to critique ecomodernism further because that’s my dad’s speciality and I don’t want to tread on his toes on his own website. However, for those who want to draw a connection, it’s not difficult to see how modernist restructuring of landscapes and environments based around largely Western ideas of productivity, efficiency and political economy connects to ecomodernism, and how these approaches emanating from particularly Western ways of viewing the world contribute to the ‘awful lives’ so many do experience in the world today in urban spaces as well as rural ones.

As is often the case when writing against the grain of common perceptions I’ve found it a bit hard to know where to start telling this story. Really you don’t have to look very far in Bangladesh to see the way the agrarian suffuses the national imaginary. The national anthem ‘Amar Sonar Bangla’, meaning My Golden Bengal, seemed as good a place as any. The song written by Tagore begins:

“My Bengal of gold, I love you
Forever your skies, your air set my heart in tune
as if it were a flute,
In Spring, Oh mother mine, the fragrance from
Your mango groves make me wild with joy-
Ah, what a thrill!
In Autumn, Oh mother mine,
in the full-blossomed paddy fields,
I have seen spread all over – sweet smiles!”

The love of the skies, the golden fields of rice, and the mango groves speaks to a love for agrarian culture. That is not to say that a national anthem necessarily represents its people, one would be a fool to think ‘god save our gracious King’ represents all the people within Britain, or even most. The song was written by Tagore in 1905, when Bengal was partitioned by the British, to attempt to unite Bengalis who had been divided by religion and as such was trying to access a shared identity that transcended religion.

It’s interesting and informative that in this historical moment Tagore chose such an agrarian image to unite Bengalis. Tagore was much less enamoured with the rural than Gandhi who advocated for a vision of agrarian and village-based self-sufficiency. In many ways Tagore was a moderniser both in his art and in his wider political philosophy. While appeals to rural idylls are a common trope in modernist nationalism, to anyone familiar with the culture of Bengal the vision represented in “Amar sonar Bangla” makes a lot of sense. Bengal’s agrarian history is reflected in much Bengali culture. For example, when meeting people for the first time it is not uncommon to ask “apnar bari kothay?”, meaning “where is your village?”, highlighting the way in which even for urbanites of multiple generations a connection to agrarian place remains important in locating themselves and others.

These connections to the village are maintained by many. In Dhaka around Eid, a city infamous for its traffic and streets full of people is almost empty, with much of the population returning to their ancestral village to see family and friends, and to eat and distribute meat among the community. Eid-al-adha is known as Qurbani eid, where those who can afford to purchase cattle and goats and ritually sacrifice them distribute the meat throughout the community. For weeks before people will purchase cattle, and lorries full of livestock will travel into Dhaka to be assessed and purchased. This leads to much conversation with people moving through the city being asked how much they paid and the merits of the animals being discussed widely.

The massive temporary migration as people return to their villages speaks to a deep connection to place beyond the bounds of the city, with most people opting to escape their lives in the city at least temporarily and return to the rural areas from which they or their ancestors came. In these moments the clear distinction between the agrarian and urban common in the West becomes complicated with livestock invading the cities, and many urban dwellers returning to the countryside.

My point is the agrarian history of somewhere like Bangladesh is different to much of the West and plays a different role in the broader culture, in the relationships people have, and in the skills people possess, for example in selecting good livestock. This is not to say that it has ever been a perfect or bucolic idyll, but that people’s experience of agriculture is situated within a particular cultural identity specific to the region from which they come. Thus, the assumption so often made in the West that the people in agriculture are the people who are unfortunate enough to have been left behind by modernisation is deeply flawed.

Knowing much of this history it still came as a surprise to me when I began researching seasonal labour migrants from Southwestern region of Bangladesh how emphatically these migrants described their desire for a future in which they could return to farming and agricultural labour and stop migrating to urban areas to work in brick fields. Of the twenty or so people I spoke to, not a single one said they who enjoyed working in the urban economy. Instead, each described their desire to return to some sort of farming.

The reason this group of migrants weren’t farming wasn’t because they had been lucky enough to escape, but because they had been unlucky enough to live in an area identified as bountiful in resources that could help provide for the economy of first the British and then the Pakistani government of the region. Between 1947 and 1971 Bangladesh was known as East Pakistan and was part of the broader Pakistani state. This was largely an extractive relationship with the political and economic centres based in West Pakistan and Bangladesh providing much of the resources to the young country.

In an attempt to increase the productivity of the coastal region the Pakistani state worked with the World Bank and Dutch engineers to create a network of embankments to reduce the time in which land was flooded. Instead of increasing productivity this served to reduce fertility and increase salination, making it harder to grow vegetables and rice. In turn shrimp farming was suggested as an adaptation which would contribute to the Bangladeshi economy but required much less labour and so served to reduce the potential for agrarian livelihoods for many in the population. Much has been written about this (see references below), but the key point is that people are leaving the land not necessarily because agriculture is backbreaking and they are desperate to leave, but instead because of the way colonialism, induction into the global economy and political power work.

While sat in a large muddy treeless expanse, surrounded by the brownish turquoise of shrimp ponds in 2022 a shrimp farmer explained to me that when he had been growing rice and vegetables in the early 2000s, he required about 100-125 labourers across the year for his 25 acres of land, but with shrimp he only needed fifteen. While this might seem to some a brilliant business innovation that saved labour costs, he seemed sad as he signalled to a fisherman sat next to him who I had been speaking to moments before and explained almost apologetically that the fisherman was only a fisherman because he couldn’t access land or work in agriculture, to which the fisherman enthusiastically agreed.

The fisherman explained that everyone wanted to grow rice, and knew how to grow rice, but they couldn’t because of salination, and issues related to accessing land. It is clear in these sorts of conversations that rather than agriculture being the problem that people are trying to escape it is a problem for them that they are being pushed out of or excluded from agriculture. The fisherman’s life came with its own challenges. He described how during Cyclone Sidr in 2007 he was caught at sea in the build up to the cyclone and was forced to find shelter on a small island with a group of other fishermen. As the cyclone hit the island it killed some of the fishermen, and they were forced to bury the bodies on the island. While this may have also been his fate if he was on the mainland, I doubt he would have anything polite to say to someone who explained to him at least he wasn’t farming.

Most of my interlocutors worked in brick fields, which is maybe closer to the urban industrial economy that many imagine for those leaving the land. However, this isn’t an escape from backbreaking work so much as a different type of backbreaking work, and one with less autonomy. Workers are given advances at the beginning of the season and need to work off the advance through piece rate wages. If rain or other disruptions lower output, the workers themselves bear the costs.

Exiting agriculture and agricultural labour often means induction into precarious labour relations far from home moving heavy bricks, or working in staggeringly hot brick kilns, with some reports of temperatures around the brick kilns of above 50 degrees centigrade. This is not to say that these fishermen or brick field workers wouldn’t jump at the opportunity for better paid employment, but they may well dream of funnelling the funds received back into improving their lot in the rural economy from where they came if they could, potentially purchasing land and realising the dream of returning to farming. However, this is made hard by processes beyond their control with them more likely to become involved in aquaculture than agriculture because of a history of modernist interventions in the landscape.

Even in urban settings conversations are infused with connections to the rural and agrarian. People will often discuss wistfully the land their family owns in their bari, or village. A close friend who I have lived with for much of the time I have spent in Dhaka described how their cousin was looking to return to their village to take on some of the family land to live and farm. They are no doubt privileged and even within the same country the way he is likely to farm will look very different to some of those mentioned above. However, despite having a relatively successful career in the civil service he is drawn back to farming.

I talked to many of my friends this summer about their relationship to the rural and many liked the idea of escaping the city. Not necessarily to farm, but even for the middle class the city can be a place of stagnation, frustration and constrained ambition. It was exactly this stagnation that saw students take to the streets to oppose the quota system that allowed the grandchildren of freedom fighters priority access to places in the civil service. Students from elite public universities began a protest to reform these quotas that were joined by students from private universities and then much of the population, which in turn toppled the dictatorship that had been in place for fifteen years. I wouldn’t want to put words into the mouths of the diverse groups of people who took part in the movement, but I know from conversations with people I know who participated that it became something bigger than simply a movement for quota reform and became instead a protest about the stagnation, corruption and oppression that were so common in urban life.

So often the urban is discussed as though it is a solution to problems in the rural, and in this narrative the problems of the urban itself are made invisible. It’s more complex than that, and many of the same processes of dispossession and modernist restructuring that push people out of agriculture exist in towns and cities in a different guise. Targets of the looting and vandalism in the protest movement included an express road allowing moderately wealthy car owners to avoid Dhaka’s infamous traffic, and the brand-new metro. This infrastructure represented a vision of a new Bangladesh which excluded much of society and signified something so imbued with the imagination of the elite that it was one of the first targets of the civil unrest. If leaving agriculture is good for poor people, which many scholars argue it is not, is the city that much better?

When people talk about the backbreaking toil of agricultural work, they so often ignore the political economy that makes these people’s lives hard. Instead, they focus on the individual farmer as though everything that makes it hard for them to farm is out of anyone’s control. This replicates a nascent neo-liberalism through creating the farmer as an individual who is failing in the free market, thus should leave for his and his family’s welfare.

Instead, one needs to look at the broader context in which the farmer exists. Histories of colonial land management policies and modernist Green Revolution policies have served to push many small farmers off the land, while favouring richer industrial farmers. These systems of thought foster the assumption that people don’t want to be farming, rather than paying attention to what the farmers themselves want.

This is not to say that farmers don’t want more secure, fulfilling and comfortable lives, but often if you speak to them, it is not escape from farming that they see as route to this but access to agriculture on better terms. While my experience and knowledge are deeply grounded in the Bangladesh context, research literature on rural to urban migration in much of the Global South tells a similar story – not so much people escaping farming but people being pushed out of farming to make way for modernist schemes, capital accumulation and land use change. ‘Development’ schemes are often justified in terms of poverty reduction (for example, the Green Revolution), but the voices of the people affected by these schemes often aren’t heard precisely because of their poverty. In the introduction I highlighted that narratives of small farmers escaping farming abound in Western discourse but so often the farmers voices are lost because people don’t think to look for them.

Further reading:

Paprocki, K., 2021, Threatening Dystopias: The Global Politics of Climate Change Adaptation in Bangladesh, Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

Dewan, C., 2021, Misreading the Bengal Delta: Climate Change, Development, and Livelihoods in Coastal Bangladesh, Seattle: University of Washington Press.