Food security is now constantly on the lips of politicians, policymakers and socially aware circles. The reason is easy to guess: a large part of Bangladesh's population, especially the extremely poor households, faces acute food shortage. There has been no shortage of research, seminars and conferences on food security in this country, nor is there now.

But all of it seems to diagnose the disease in the conventional way, presenting a bundle of recommendations to achieve food security by raising production, purchasing power, awareness and nutritious food. Often these come from consultants' reports funded from abroad. Food security may have improved at the margins year by year, but without a big push millions still go hungry or half-fed. The proof that the causes we have "discovered" so far are not the right ones is that food supply is rising and the government is providing food for the poor in special programmes, yet people are suffering for lack of food. So where does the fault lie?

A book that tries to answer this question has recently taken a place on my bookshelf: "Why Nations Fail to Feed the Poor: The Politics of Food Security in Bangladesh". Mohammad Mozahidul Islam, a professor in the history department at Jahangirnagar University, has written this 313-page hardback (Manohar, 2022) on food security as a whole. Across seven chapters, set in economics, politics and history, it offers a wide-ranging and striking analysis of the details of food security.

Written using quantitative and qualitative methods, the book's aim is somewhat unusual. Using 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 is how the Bangladesh government responds to the country's hungry, given the existing state of food security, resources and above all a severe lack of good governance, and what the limits of that response are, and why. The author holds that domestic and international politics are bound up in the many dimensions of Bangladesh's food security, and that institutional capacity, or state capacity, as a determinant of food security cannot be ignored.

The book therefore argues that the deep root of food insecurity in Bangladesh is the nature of the state itself, together with the political institutions that link state and society. Millions go hungry in the country not because of scarce resources but because of the nature of the state. In the neopatrimonial Bangladeshi state, the author argues, weak administrative capacity, ineffective institutions and a lack of coherent thinking make government efforts to reach development and economic goals fail again and again.

A further concern is that whatever capacity the government has is steadily eroding, so services at people's doorsteps become a "golden deer", something always out of reach. Most importantly, Bangladesh's neopatrimonial governments survive on patronage politics, in which personal exchange relationships decide what the government does. Seen this way, neopatrimonial government is the direct antithesis of good governance, and of development. Because the nature of the state is a weak link between society and state, weak state capacity and patronage politics, ensuring access to food becomes difficult for Bangladesh.

There is good reason to think that ensuring food security within the existing state structure is hard indeed. Without committed, radical reform, that is, unless the country can break out of a state structure surrounded by the politics of appeasement and exploitation, there is no escape. The big proof is that more than 50 years after independence, a large part of Bangladesh's people still lack food security. In other words, there is no point bailing water from a well while leaving the rotten frog in it.

Some of the book's observations strike a chord and seem to voice our own thoughts. First, the author holds that what passes for market management in Bangladesh is merely political and for show, with little concern for the real causes and dedicated to maximising political gain, so public policy cannot improve market efficiency. Second, whether in public food distribution, land reform, building administrative capacity or implementing policy, the idea of "partial reform" sets a trap, making failure to ensure food security inevitable.

Third, Bangladesh is a weak state to begin with, and on top of that, appeasement politics within a neopatrimonial structure and poor-quality bureaucrats squeeze state capacity further. Fourth, alongside the state's eroding capacity, pre-colonial customs have kept the link between society and state weak, so implementing policy for society remains largely out of reach.

A good part of the book is taken up with wide theoretical, historical and empirical discussion of rent-seeking, corruption and "misrule", extortion and market failure, and statistical errors. The author believes their heavy presence threatens food availability and access. For example, because of rent-seeking and corruption at government level, state intervention, especially in food distribution and procurement, has not had the positive effect expected.

I think Mohammad Mozahidul Islam's book is essential reading for policymakers and social scientists alike. Its contribution to the current discourse on food crisis is immense. It reviews the political and historical background of food security and is perhaps the first attempt at an analytical review of the government's contribution to providing food security. It is not written only through a technical or economic lens; it can be said to take a multidisciplinary view.

Still, the subtitle might have been catchier as the main title, and one or two chapters could have been a little shorter for the reader's comfort. I hope for a Bengali version of this high-quality book.

Source: Jagonews24. First published in Bengali on The Agro News.