Agriculture and Livestock

The availability, access, and consumption of nutritious food is extremely important. Despite declining arable agricultural land, Bangladesh has made substantial progress in boosting domestic food production, improving access to food by increasing household income, and enhancing nutritional outcomes. Nevertheless, the challenges to food and nutrition security remain formidable.

This book aims to puncture two popular myths: that Bangladesh is a flat alluvial plain where soil fertility is maintained by silt provided by annual floods; and that the country will be overwhelmed contour by contour by sea-level rise in the 21st century which will displace many million people.

After decades of stagnation, Bengali agricultural output finally began to grow faster than the population from the mid-1980s onwards. While this achievement has been widely heralded, there has been no effort to analyse in detail the reasons for and the consequences of agrarian change in the region. Providing a unique interdisciplinary synthesis, this volume— which draws chiefly upon micro studies of villages in West Bengal and Bangladesh—explores the complex causality between agricultural growth, government policy and local level practice, and agrarian social change.

What have been the true achievements of the much discussed green revolutions in the Indian sub-continent? What coalition of political forces came to choose the advice of the technologists over those urging structural reforms as the solution to India's agrarian transformation? What have been the costs of a development strategy which has ignored the agrarian masses in favour of securing the political allegiance of a landed minority? With a rare clarity of vision, Prof.