This paper reviews the political economy of agrarian change in Bangladesh since 1947, and again after 1971 together with the literature on de-peasantisation in South Asia, and then reflects empirically on the contemporary political economy of agrarian change in order to contextualise the future options for agriculture. The qualitative data were collected through field visits and interviews in ten agroecological regions. The paper identifies four agrarian trajectories: family farm; corporate farming; rentier-contractor system; and new entrant tenant farms. The major argument of the paper is that the self-contained family farm is disappearing through a disarticulation of production functions at the family level and their re-articulation within a wider agrarian system, entailing the leasing of owned cultivable land to operational contractors with access to capital and contract labour. In this way, a new rentier-contractor system emerges (3rd trajectory). This is a win-win production arrangement between land owners and land operators, featuring a clearer separation of land ownership from land cultivation. One major conclusion is that the new lumpy technology leads to an enlargement of production unit or contractor’s service area, not through transfer of land ownership (land reform) but through ‘operational consolidation’ of fragmented lands via service markets. However, there is a parallel social process (4th trajectory) with new entrant part-time tenants using savings from non-farm and remittance income to lease land for security and status. However, there are also signs that farm machinery (e.g. small portable irrigation pumps) adjust to small plots. The authors argue that Bangladesh represents a hybrid model of de-peasantisation, leading to the re-distribution of economic returns between new economic actors as productivity increases in a manner that resembles the socio-demographic phenomenon of ‘rurbanisation’.
Wood et al. (Tue,) studied this question.