Food security and Bangladesh's agriculture

In the villages of northern Bangladesh an old word still surfaces around October: monga. The aman rice is not yet ripe, there is no work in the fields and the household rice is running out. A few decades ago this was a season of hunger for many families. Much has changed since; the country is now close to self-sufficient in rice. But a full stomach and a well-nourished body are not the same thing, and the gap between the two is the real question of food security. Food security describes a state in which all the people of a country, at all times, can get enough safe and nutritious food. It underpins both healthy lives and the country's lasting development.

The definition used around the world today comes from the World Food Summit held in Rome in 1996. At that summit, convened by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), food security was said to exist when all people, at all times, have physical and economic access to sufficient, safe and nutritious food that meets their dietary needs and food preferences for an active and healthy life. What matters about this definition is that it does not only count the rice in the warehouses. It asks whether people can afford the food, whether it nourishes them, and whether it is still there when disaster strikes.

From that definition come the four pillars of food security. If one is weak, the whole structure wobbles.

The first is availability: whether enough food is produced in, or imported into, the country. At its centre is the production of staples such as rice, wheat, vegetables, fish and meat.

The second is access. Food in the market is not enough; people must be able to afford it and reach it. The aim is economic and physical access to food for every class of people, and above all getting food to the poor.

The third is utilisation, meaning the quality and nutritional value of food: keeping food nutritious, making sure people eat healthily, and producing organic and safe food. Clean water and sanitation belong here too, because a sick body cannot make proper use of the nutrients it eats.

The fourth is stability. Food today and none tomorrow is not security. The aim is a continuous supply that holds through natural disasters, economic crises and any other shock.

To understand where the country stands today, it helps to look back. In the years after independence Bangladesh was a food-deficit country. The famine of 1974 is the most painful memory of that time: floods, soaring food prices and a failure of distribution together cost a great many lives. The population then was less than half of today's, and still not everyone could be fed. Dependence on foreign food aid was heavy.

Over the following decades change came step by step. The Bangladesh Rice Research Institute, founded in 1970, released one high-yielding variety after another. As deep and shallow tube wells spread irrigation, the dry-season boro crop became the country's largest. Chemical fertiliser, improved seed and the advice of the Department of Agricultural Extension's field staff meant the same land began to yield two, sometimes three, crops a year. That is why a country with more than twice as many people can now grow its own staple.

The fate of monga in the north is part of that change. The weeks of joblessness and hunger before the aman harvest in the Rangpur region have eased considerably, thanks to early-maturing aman varieties, seasonal employment schemes and wider social protection. But the lean season is not entirely history; in a disaster year it can return.

Bangladesh is an agricultural country, yet a growing population, climate change and social and economic pressures keep food security at the top of its concerns. The country has made remarkable progress, but some specific weaknesses remain.

The success lies in production. Bangladesh has come a long way in growing its main staples, rice, wheat and vegetables. Rice output reached 38.6 million tonnes in the 2022-23 fiscal year, a large contribution to meeting the country's food needs. The population is now close to 170 million, and the farmland has not grown; it is shrinking. Feeding more people from less land has been possible thanks to high-yielding varieties, the spread of irrigation and the hard work of farmers. The Bangladesh Rice Research Institute has released a long line of high-yielding varieties, along with rice that tolerates salinity, flooding and drought, protecting harvests in difficult conditions.

The nutrition picture is different. The country is self-sufficient in rice, but nutritious foods such as fruit, milk, eggs and protein remain in short supply. On many plates rice is the mainstay, with a little lentil or leafy greens; fish, meat, eggs or milk are not regular fare. Citing FAO data, it is often said that about 30 per cent of the country's children are malnourished. According to the most recent Bangladesh Demographic and Health Survey, of 2022, about 24 per cent of children under five are stunted, too short for their age; about 22 per cent are underweight; and about 11 per cent are wasted, too thin for their height. Roughly one child in four, in other words, carries the mark of long-term undernutrition.

The Global Hunger Index tells a similar tale. In the 2025 index Bangladesh ranks 85th of 123 countries, with a score of 19.2, a level the index classes as moderate hunger. That is great progress on a few decades ago, but there is still a long way to go.

Self-sufficiency in rice does not mean self-sufficiency in everything. Much of the wheat the country eats has to be imported, and so does a large share of its edible oil, pulses, sugar and milk powder. Whatever happens on world markets hits the domestic market directly. When wheat, cooking oil and fertiliser prices rose worldwide after the war in Ukraine began in 2022, low-income families in Bangladesh felt it sharply. A stronger dollar raises the import bill, and that cost ends up in the shopper's bag.

That experience has pushed the stability pillar back to the front. Adequate stocks in government warehouses, a wider range of import sources and more home-grown pulses and oilseeds are all ways of absorbing shocks from outside.

The word "safe" carries special weight in the definition of food security. Food may be plentiful, but if it is adulterated or carries harmful chemicals or excessive pesticide residues, it threatens health. Concern about the misuse of chemicals to ripen fruit or keep fish looking fresh has run for years in Bangladesh. To tackle it, the Bangladesh Food Safety Authority was set up under the Safe Food Act 2013, charged with overseeing safety along the whole path from production to the consumer's plate. Everyone from the farmer in the field to the wholesaler, the processor and the restaurant has a part to play.

Nutritionists use a phrase for another problem: hidden hunger. A stomach can be full while the body lacks micronutrients such as iron, zinc, vitamin A or iodine. The deficiency cannot be seen, but the damage goes on inside: an anaemic teenage girl, a child who falls ill again and again, a pupil who cannot concentrate. A rice-heavy diet raises the risk, because rice alone does not supply enough of these nutrients.

Agricultural research has responded. In 2013 the Bangladesh Rice Research Institute released BRRI dhan62, the world's first zinc-enriched rice variety, and more have followed. Since nearly everyone eats rice every day, delivering nutrients through rice can work on a large scale. Still, nothing replaces a varied diet.

Fish is the main source of animal protein for people in Bangladesh; the old Bengali saying describes its people as made of "fish and rice". With the spread of fish farming in ponds, beels, rivers and coastal waters, the country has risen into the ranks of the world's leading inland fish producers. The growth of poultry farms has put eggs and chicken within reach of many more people. Yet in poor households these foods are still not regular, because protein is the first thing cut when prices rise. Small fish in particular, eaten whole with their bones and rich in calcium and micronutrients, can do a great deal for children's nutrition.

Food is relatively plentiful in the cities, but in remote areas shortage remains a major challenge. In many parts of the haor wetlands, the river islands (chars), the hills and the coast, roads close in the monsoon, markets are far away and prices are higher. Getting food there requires better transport and supply chains. Even within the cities, slum dwellers and day labourers see food in the market but cannot afford it when prices rise. Both availability and access are tested. When prices rise, such families first cut back on fish, eggs and milk, then on the amount of food itself. Some borrow to get by; some take a child out of school to work. Every swing in market prices is, for a poor household, not a matter of accounts but of what is on the plate.

Climate change is bringing floods, droughts and cyclones again and again, and each one strikes at food production. A big flood drowns ripe rice; a cyclone sweeps away coastal fields, fish enclosures and livestock at once. In the Barind tract of the north-west, drought and a falling water table are raising the cost of irrigation.

Farmers in the haor wetlands of the north-east face a different risk. There they grow essentially one crop a year, boro rice. If flash floods pouring down from upstream breach the embankments just before the harvest in April, a whole season's crop can drown in days. That is what happened across wide areas of haor boro land in the early floods of 2017, and many families depended on food aid until the next year.

On the coast, after Cyclone Sidr in 2007 and Cyclone Aila in 2009, salt water left much land unfit for cultivation for years. More generally, on the coast, salinity is eroding the fertility of the land. By the Soil Resource Development Institute's count, salt-affected land in Bangladesh grew from about 833,000 hectares in 1973 to about 1,056,000 hectares in 2009, an increase of about 26 per cent in 36 years. Many crops fail on saline land, and much of it lies fallow in the dry season.

The obstacles are bound up with one another. A growing population raises the demand for food, and that pressure falls on limited farmland and natural resources. Climate change increases crop losses from floods, droughts and cyclones and weighs on the whole production process.

The land crisis is deepening. Urbanisation, new housing, roads, factories and brick kilns are eating into farmland and directly limiting food production. Land that disappears under concrete never returns to the plough.

Malnutrition and inequality are another major problem. The poor do not get enough nutritious food, and without it children's growth and health suffer. Childhood undernutrition affects not only the body but the developing brain, a cost paid over a lifetime and, in the end, by the economy as well.

Weak storage and distribution cause heavy losses. For want of proper storage, much of what is produced goes to waste. At the peak of the season tomato or potato prices collapse and farmers cannot cover their costs, yet a few months later the same produce is expensive. The lack of cold stores, warehouses and efficient distribution makes those swings worse.

• A growing population on limited land
• Climate change and natural disasters
• Loss of farmland to urbanisation
• Malnutrition and food inequality
• Weak storage and distribution

A shortage of farm labour is a newer challenge. Young people are leaving villages for cities, factories or jobs abroad, and older farmers are left in the fields. At the peak of transplanting and harvest, workers are hard to find and wages rise. Unless farming can be made a profitable and respected career for the young, future food production is at risk.

The first route is agricultural development: wider use of improved technology and high-yielding seed, alongside farm mechanisation and better irrigation. When labour is scarce, transplanters and harvesters help farmers finish their work on time. But rice alone is not enough. Raising the output of pulses, oilseeds, fruit, vegetables, fish, milk and eggs, diversifying what is grown, is the key to closing the nutrition gap. A vegetable garden in the homestead, fish in the pond and a few chickens can make a big difference to a rural family's diet.

The second is storage and distribution: modern warehouses and cold stores, and a more efficient distribution system, so that the food of the harvest season serves the whole year instead of rotting, and reaches remote areas at fair prices.

The third is nutrition education. People need to know why nutritious food matters, and malnutrition needs effective action. Often it is not expensive food that changes a child's nutrition but the right use of food close at hand, such as greens, lentils, seasonal fruit and small fish. Pregnant women and children under two need special attention, because undernutrition at that stage of life is hard to make up later.

The fourth is government support: subsidies and food aid for the poor, and a stable food supply. Bangladesh has examples. Under the Food Friendly Programme, poor card-holding families receive 30 kilograms of rice a month at Tk 15 a kilogram during the lean months of the year, and the number of beneficiary families has grown from 5 million to 5.5 million. Open-market sales of cheap rice and flour, and relief during disasters, add to that safety net.

Production gets far more attention than waste in discussions of food security, yet food is lost at every step from field to plate. After harvest some grain is lost during threshing in open yards and drying in the sun, and some rots when rain catches it. Vegetables and fruit are bruised on the way to market, packed tightly in sacks on trucks. Greens that do not sell are thrown out at the end of the day. And the leftovers from city homes, celebrations and restaurants are considerable.

Cutting that waste means more food without a single extra acre. Better threshers and dryers, plastic crates for fruit and vegetables, cold stores near the farms and awareness in every household are practical ways to do it. Behind every wasted grain lie the farmer's labour, water, fertiliser and land; remembering that is enough to see what waste really costs.

One person is often forgotten in discussions of food security: the farmer. The people who feed the country are often food-insecure themselves. When farmers do not get a fair price, they grow less next season, sell land or leave farming. Securing farmers' incomes through fair crop prices, credit on farmer-friendly terms and protection such as crop insurance is part of food security itself.

Women's role matters too. In rural households women manage much of the vegetable garden, the poultry, the livestock and the seed store, and often decide what goes on the family's plates. Putting training, credit and information in their hands improves the family's nutrition directly.

Food security is a basic condition of a country's development. For Bangladesh it means raising farm output, building sound distribution and making nutritious food available to all. A country that once struggled with regular food deficits and seasonal hunger has learned to grow its own rice. The next step is the one that matters now: lentils, eggs, fish, greens and fruit beside the rice on every child's plate. Lasting food security is the foundation on which a healthy, prosperous and strong nation can be built.

Photo: A farmer harvesting paddy from his field, Balaram Mahalder / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)