Book Under Review Traces Bangladesh's Hunger to the Nature of the State

On 4 January 2026, the Bangladeshi news portal Jagonews24 carried in its opinion section a column titled "The Politics of Food Security" by Abdul Bayes, a former vice-chancellor of Jahangirnagar University. The column was a review of "Why Nations Fail to Feed the Poor: The Politics of Food Security in Bangladesh", a book by Mohammad Mozahidul Islam, a professor in the history department of the same university. Bayes used the book to ask why millions of people in Bangladesh still went hungry or half-fed at a time when food supply was rising and the government was running food programmes for the poor, and he found the book's answer persuasive: the root of the problem, it argues, lies in the nature of the state itself.

Bayes began by observing that food security was constantly on the lips of politicians, policymakers and socially aware circles, and that the reason was easy to guess: a large part of the population, especially the extremely poor households, faced acute food shortage. Bangladesh, he wrote, had never lacked research, seminars and conferences on the subject, and still did not.

In his view, though, most of that work diagnosed the problem in the conventional way. It produced bundles of recommendations to raise production, purchasing power, awareness and the supply of nutritious food, and in many cases the recommendations came from consultants' reports funded from abroad. Food security may have improved at the margins from year to year, he wrote, but without a big push millions still lived hungry or half-fed.

For him, the proof that the causes "discovered" so far were not the right ones was the paradox at the centre of the column: food supply was rising and the government was providing food for the poor through special programmes, yet people were still suffering for lack of food. "So where does the fault lie?" he asked.

The answer, Bayes wrote, had recently arrived on his bookshelf. He described the book as a 313-page hardback published by Manohar in 2022, in which Mohammad Mozahidul Islam examines food security as a whole across seven chapters, setting the subject in economics, politics and history. Routledge, which lists an edition of the book with a 2023 copyright year and 318 pages, describes the author as professor and chairperson of the Department of History at Jahangirnagar University in Dhaka. Its contents run from a preface and an introduction through chapters titled "Food Security, the State and Institutional Effectiveness", "The Political Origin of Hunger in Bangladesh", "The Problems of Food Availability and Accessibility", "Governance, Food Availability and Food Security in Bangladesh" and "Governance, the State and Food Accessibility", to a conclusion.

According to the review, the book uses both quantitative and qualitative methods, and its aim is somewhat unusual. Rather than adding another technical study of output or nutrition, it takes a political economy approach: it reviews the political and economic context of food security in Bangladesh and the government's role in meeting the challenge. The central question, as Bayes put it, is how the government responds to the country's hungry people given the existing state of food security, the resources at hand and, above all, a severe lack of good governance, and what the limits of that response are, and why.

The author holds, the review says, that domestic and international politics are bound up in the many dimensions of Bangladesh's food security, and that institutional capacity, or the capacity of the state, cannot be ignored as a determinant of whether people can eat. Routledge's description makes the same point in its own words: it says the book argues that conventional approaches offer only a partial diagnosis of the economic or nutritional problems, uses the concept of "neo-patrimonialism" to analyse the political system, examines the obstacles to food security from policy formulation to implementation, and holds that "the root cause of food insecurity is deeply embedded in the nature of the government itself".

Jahangirnagar University, where the author teaches and the reviewer once served as vice-chancellor, stands about 32 kilometres from Dhaka near Savar, on 697.56 acres of land. Banglapedia records it as the first residential public university in Bangladesh. An ordinance to start its academic programmes was promulgated on 20 August 1970, and it began with honours departments of economics, geography, statistics and mathematics.

The term at the centre of the book has a long official history. A 2006 policy brief from the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) notes that it first appeared in the mid-1970s, when the World Food Conference of 1974 defined food security in terms of supply: the availability at all times of adequate world supplies of basic foodstuffs and the stability of their prices. In 1983 FAO shifted the focus to access, defining the aim as ensuring that all people at all times have both physical and economic access to the basic food they need. In 1986 a World Bank report on poverty and hunger drew the distinction between chronic food insecurity, tied to continuing poverty and low incomes, and transitory food insecurity caused by natural disasters, economic collapse or conflict.

The definition most widely used today was adopted at the World Food Summit of 1996: "Food security exists 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." FAO's brief breaks it into four dimensions:

• availability: sufficient quantities of food of appropriate quality, supplied through domestic production or imports, including food aid;
• access: access by individuals to adequate resources, or entitlements, for acquiring appropriate foods for a nutritious diet;
• utilisation: the use of food through an adequate diet, clean water, sanitation and health care to reach a state of nutritional well-being;
• stability: access to adequate food at all times, without the risk of losing it through sudden shocks, such as an economic or climatic crisis, or through cyclical events such as seasonal food insecurity.

The second of these dimensions is where politics enters. FAO defines entitlements as the set of all commodity bundles over which a person can establish command "given the legal, political, economic and social arrangements of the community in which they live". The idea draws on Amartya Sen's 1981 book "Poverty and Famines: An Essay on Entitlement and Deprivation", which the FAO brief credits with highlighting how personal entitlements, based on production, labour, trade and transfers, shape access to food. The brief adds that, as the link between food security, starvation and crop failure fades, the analysis of food insecurity "as a social and political construct" has emerged. Islam's book, as Bayes describes it, belongs to that line of thinking.

Banglapedia, the national encyclopedia of Bangladesh, describes food security at two levels. Household food security depends on whether a family's earners can secure enough food for all its members at all times; national food security depends on the government's ability to secure enough food for the whole nation. The encyclopedia notes that national food security in Bangladesh directly affects the country's social and political situation, and that it is tied to total food production, internal procurement, food aid, import capacity and a range of national and international issues.

From this starting point, the review says, the book claims that the deep root of food insecurity in Bangladesh is "the nature of the Bangladesh state" itself, together with the political institutions that connect state and society. Millions go hungry in the country, in this reading, not because resources are scarce but because of what kind of state it is. The author argues that in the neopatrimonial Bangladeshi state, weak administrative capacity, ineffective institutions and the lack of a coherent line of thinking cause government efforts to reach development and economic goals to fail again and again.

Bayes highlighted a further concern raised in the book: whatever capacity the government has is steadily eroding, so that services at people's doorsteps become a "golden deer", the Bengali image of something always out of reach. Most importantly, in the book's account, neopatrimonial governments survive on patronage politics, in which personal relationships of exchange decide what the government does. Seen this way, the review says, neopatrimonial government is the direct antithesis of good governance, and of development too. Because the state is marked by a weak link between society and state, weak capacity and the politics of patronage, ensuring access to food becomes a difficult task.

Neopatrimonialism is a term from political science. It is generally traced to the sociologist Shmuel N. Eisenstadt, who used it in his 1973 book "Traditional Patrimonialism and Modern Neopatrimonialism", deriving it from Max Weber's "patrimonialism", a form of rule in which administrative and military staff answer only to the ruler. In the neopatrimonial form, elements of patrimonial rule and of rational, bureaucratic rule coexist and are sometimes interwoven, as a 2006 working paper by Gero Erdmann and Ulf Engel of the German Institute of Global and Area Studies put it. The political scientist Christopher Clapham described it as a form of organisation in which relationships of a broadly patrimonial type pervade a political and administrative system that is formally built on rational-legal lines, so that public office is used for personal gain.

The concept has its critics. In 1998 the economist Thandika Mkandawire argued that states described as neopatrimonial had pursued a wide range of policies, some of them squarely developmental, and that the label, beyond describing a style of governance, says little about which policies a state will follow and with what success.

Bayes himself drew a firm conclusion from the book's argument. There was good reason to think, he wrote, that ensuring food security within the existing state structure was hard indeed, and that without committed, radical reform, without breaking out of a state structure surrounded by the politics of appeasement and exploitation, there would be no escape. The big proof, in his view, was that more than 50 years after independence a large part of the country's people still lacked food security. He summed it up with a Bengali saying: there is no point bailing water out of a well while the rotten frog stays in it.

Some of the book's observations, Bayes wrote, struck a chord and seemed to voice his own thoughts. He listed four:

• what passes for market management in Bangladesh, the author holds, is largely political and for show, with little concern for the real causes and aimed at maximising political gain, so that public policy cannot make markets more efficient;
• whether in the public food distribution system, land reform, building administrative capacity or implementing policy, the idea of "partial reform" sets a trap that makes failure to ensure food security inevitable;
• Bangladesh is a weak state to begin with, and appeasement politics within a neopatrimonial structure, together with poor-quality bureaucrats, squeeze its capacity further;
• alongside the state's eroding capacity, pre-colonial customs have kept the link between society and state weak, so that implementing policy for society remains largely out of reach.

A good part of the book, according to the review, is a wide theoretical, historical and empirical discussion of rent-seeking, corruption and "misrule", extortion, market failure and errors in statistics. The author believes their heavy presence threatens both the availability of food and people's access to it. As one example, the review says, rent-seeking and corruption at the level of government have meant that state intervention, particularly in food distribution and procurement, has not had the positive effect that was expected.

Rent-seeking is the economists' name for growing one's existing wealth by manipulating public policy or economic conditions without creating new wealth. The idea became a subject of lasting study after papers by Gordon Tullock in 1967 and Anne Krueger in 1974.

A feature in The Business Standard on 15 October 2024, which drew on the book, gave more detail of its argument. It said the book finds the state's limits evident in its failure to raise domestic farm output, which leaves the country reliant on imports and food aid, and that it gives four reasons why dependence on imports is unreliable: exposure to uncertainty in the world rice market; slow government decision-making and the lack of a robust early-warning system, although floods and droughts are the main causes of swings in supply; weak regulation of private grain traders, which the book links to patronage and poor governance; and a Trading Corporation of Bangladesh that rent-seeking, corruption and inefficiency keep from managing imports effectively.

The same feature said the book finds the public food distribution system highly politically motivated, which undermines its humanitarian goals; questions the state's commitment to food security as shown in trends in budget allocation; finds that social safety net programmes do not fully meet the needs of the vulnerable poor; and says the state has failed to provide the statistical services needed for informed decisions on food.

The tools the book scrutinises are long-standing. Banglapedia describes the national food policy formulated in 1988, implemented and monitored by the Ministry of Food, whose objectives included self-sufficiency in food, procurement of cereals from farmers at harvest time at a supportive price, supply of food to low-income groups, prices in line with people's buying capacity, and a food safety stock, or buffer stock, for disasters. Under it, the government buys grain during the harvest seasons and sells it to people at reasonable prices in the lean seasons. The encyclopedia notes that the policy covers cereals but not fish, meat, vegetables, pulses or oil, and so does not ensure complete food security.

Two programmes carry much of that work to consumers. Under the Open Market Sale (OMS), the food department sells rice and flour at subsidised prices from centres and trucks. When OMS restarted nationwide on 1 September 2022, The Business Standard reported, two tonnes of rice a day were to go to each of 2,363 centres, where holders of TCB family cards had priority and could buy 5 kg of rice twice a month at Tk 30 a kilogram, while others could buy the same amount against their national identity cards; in Dhaka, rice was also to be sold from 50 trucks.

The Food Friendly Programme (Khaddo Bandhob Karmasuchi), restarting the same day, gave 30 kg of rice a month to 50 lakh (5 million) families at Tk 15 a kilogram. In February 2025, The Daily Ittefaq reported that under the programme 50 lakh families would again receive 30 kg of rice each at Tk 15 a kilogram in March and April.

The Trading Corporation of Bangladesh (TCB), which the book singles out, is an autonomous state-owned trading enterprise under the Ministry of Commerce, set up in 1972 by Presidential Order No 68, according to Banglapedia. Its early tasks were to import commodities as the government required and to distribute them at fair prices to keep the market stable. The encyclopedia says its share of the country's imports fell from 24.84 per cent in 1972-73 to a mere 0.3 per cent under the open market policy, and that it imports sugar, soybean oil, lentils and gram and sells them to low-income people through 2,849 dealers.

On paper, policy had broadened. In June 2021 the food ministry launched the plan of action for the National Food and Nutrition Security Policy, which had been approved the previous year, as a decade-long plan with results to be achieved by 2030, The Daily Star reported. The plan set out five policy objectives, 17 strategies, 64 areas of intervention and 275 short- to long-term priority actions. It was drawn up by the ministry's Food Planning and Monitoring Unit with FAO's technical assistance through the Meeting the Undernutrition Challenge (MUCH) project, funded by USAID and the European Union, and five inter-ministerial teams from the planning wings of 18 ministries and agencies helped prepare it. The book's argument is about the gap between such plans and what reaches the hungry.

Official figures available when the review appeared show both progress and the scale of the problem Bayes described. The Bangladesh Bureau of Statistics (BBS) released "Food Security Statistics 2023" on 31 December 2023. Based on a survey of 29,760 households using eight questions on people's experience of food, it found 21.91 per cent of households in moderate or severe food insecurity and 0.83 per cent in severe food insecurity.

Rangpur division had the highest rate of moderate or severe food insecurity in that survey, 29.98 per cent, followed by Sylhet at 26.48 per cent, Mymensingh at 26 per cent and Rajshahi at 25.01 per cent; Dhaka division had the lowest, 16.40 per cent. The rate was 24.12 per cent in rural areas, 20.77 per cent in urban areas and 11.45 per cent in city corporation areas, and 36.84 per cent among the poorest households against 11.43 per cent among the richest.

The BBS Household Income and Expenditure Survey 2022, whose key findings were released in April 2023, put the national poverty rate at 18.7 per cent, down from 24.3 per cent in 2016, and extreme poverty at 5.6 per cent, down from 12.9 per cent. Poverty stood at 20.5 per cent in rural areas and 14.7 per cent in urban areas. The same survey recorded an income Gini coefficient of 0.499 in 2022, against 0.482 in 2016 and 0.458 in 2010.

The Global Hunger Index 2024, published in October 2024 by Concern Worldwide and Welthungerhilfe, gave Bangladesh a score of 19.4, ranking it 84th of 127 countries with a level of hunger classed as "moderate". Its indicators put undernourishment at 11.9 per cent of the population, stunting at 23.6 per cent of children under five, wasting at 11.0 per cent and child mortality at 2.9 per cent. The country's score had stood at 33.8 in 2000, 30.6 in 2008 and 24.7 in 2016.

Prices told the same story from the market side. A Grain and Feed Update from the US Department of Agriculture released on 27 August 2025 said domestic rice prices had reached an all-time high, with the average retail price of coarse rice at Tk 57.5 a kilogram in July 2025, 12.3 per cent above a year earlier, citing TCB market data. The report put the rise down mainly to higher paddy production and milling costs, overall inflation and inefficiencies in a supply chain with many market actors. It noted that the government had announced in mid-July plans to buy 400,000 tonnes of rice through international tenders for public granaries and that on 10 August the food ministry had authorised 242 firms to import 500,000 tonnes. It estimated the Boro harvest, the country's main rice crop, at 2.05 crore tonnes.

Banglapedia identifies the groups most exposed to household food insecurity in Bangladesh as landless farmers, day labourers, households headed by destitute women and people living in disaster-prone areas such as chars and islands. It also describes a seasonal lean period of food shortage and higher prices in October and November, and names the loss of employment and of purchasing power among the causes of transitory food insecurity.

The idea that hunger has political roots is not new in the region. Banglapedia's entry on famine states that famines are now accepted to originate mainly from "entitlement failures". It quotes Sen's point that access to food is not only a function of food supply but is influenced by factors that affect the capacity of households and social groups to establish entitlement over food, and says famines may occur even when food output and availability per head have not declined. Among the non-market factors that shape a household's entitlement, it lists socio-political status, the role of the state, the legal system and the role of the media.

The encyclopedia's account of the famine of 1974 makes the link concrete. It says that, unlike other countries short of food that year, Bangladesh's crisis was rooted partly in the historic evolution of its society and partly in poor management of the food distribution system in the face of severe floods. Successive natural disasters, the damage of the 1971 war, poor administrative and economic management, international inflation and global food, fertiliser and oil crises, combined with existing inequalities, culminated in the famine. Rangpur, Mymensingh and Sylhet were the worst affected districts, the same ones badly hit in the Great Bengal Famine of 1943, and the most severe months were July to October. The Business Standard's 2024 feature on the book also recalled that famine as the background to its argument.

Bayes closed the column with a strong recommendation. He considered the book essential reading for policymakers and social scientists alike, and its contribution to the current discourse on food crisis immense. It reviews the political and historical background of food security, he wrote, and is perhaps the first attempt at an analytical review of the government's contribution to providing food security. In his view it was written not through a purely technical or economic lens but from a multidisciplinary perspective.

He had two small reservations. The subtitle, "The Politics of Food Security in Bangladesh", might have been catchier as the main title, and one or two chapters could have been a little shorter for the reader's comfort. He ended by hoping that a Bengali version of what he called a high-quality book would follow.

Photo: Press Information Department / Wikimedia Commons (Public domain)

Sources: Jagonews24, Routledge, The Business Standard, FAO, Banglapedia, Bangladesh Bureau of Statistics (via BSS), Prothom Alo, Dhaka Tribune, The Financial Express, US Department of Agriculture (via The Daily Star), The Daily Star, The Daily Ittefaq, Wikipedia