Dr Mahbub Hossain was one of the few people with a deep understanding of Bangladesh's course since independence. Though a development economist, he held firmly that agriculture is the mainstream of agricultural Bangladesh, and he became known more as an agriculture expert than as an economist. His views on agriculture and food security were widely accepted at home and abroad, and his sudden death leaves an irreplaceable gap.

Shykh Seraj first knew him in the early 1990s, while presenting Mati O Manush on Bangladesh Television, when Dr Hossain was director general of the Bangladesh Institute of Development Studies (BIDS), where his career had begun. Their relationship deepened in 2004, when Dr Hossain headed the social sciences division of the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) at Los Baños in the Philippines, and explained to Seraj the state of rice research, IRRI's role and Bangladesh's position.

He warned then that IRRI's funding from Europe and America was shrinking, and that countries like Bangladesh must become self-reliant in rice research. He worried about climate change, social and political issues and population growth, and kept field realities at the centre of his research.

After 16 years at IRRI, he returned to Bangladesh and appeared often on Channel i on farm policy and research. When Dr Atiur Rahman became Bangladesh Bank governor, Seraj discussed credit for sharecroppers with him; Bangladesh Bank later worked through Dr Hossain to use BRAC to distribute loans to sharecroppers, a milestone in farm credit marked by a conference at Army Stadium attended by Agriculture Minister Matia Chowdhury.

In 2014, he chaired a session at the second biofortification conference in Rwanda. His research covered land reform, poor farmers, farm risk, the impact of rice research, the Green Revolution and Asia's agricultural economies. Agriculture was not his original subject, Seraj notes, but he put it ahead of his own discipline, and there are too few people who speak responsibly for fairness in agriculture.

Source: Shykh Seraj. First published in Bengali on The Agro News.