This research follows the case study methodology as the objective is to offer a situated analysis of why the rural poor experience disproportionate levels of malnutrition and how the problem may be rectified. As Yin (2004, p. 12) notes, the advantage of this methodology is that it enables the researcher “to address ‘how’ and ‘why’ questions about the real-life event, using a broad variety of empirical tools.” To this end, I undertook fieldwork in three Bangladeshi villages in early 2012 over a period of 5 months. I formally conducted 64 in-depth interviews with rural households and facilitated six focus groups separately with female and male participants equally distributed across the three sites. These interviews and focus groups helped me gain insights into the ways in which the participants experience malnutrition in their everyday lives. I also conducted 18 semi-structured interviews with various experts1 and consulted relevant secondary data from official sources with a view to interpreting these individual experiences in relation to their broader systemic context. Although my analysis and conclusion are specific to the study context, the diversity of data sources and, to a certain extent, representativeness of my sample allowed me to make a reasonably generalized claim, albeit qualitative, about the overall nature of rural malnutrition in Bangladesh and the steps necessary to prevent its recurrence. The three study villages are located in the Patuakhali 2, Pabna, and Panchagarh districts. In some ways, these villages are representatives of the diverse agroecology and micro-climate of the country. Patuakhali is located in the coastal region, prone to cyclonic storms, tidal surges, flooding and saline water intrusion into agricultural lands. With a population of approximately 1500, agriculture and fisheries are the two main occupations here. Patuakhali has a high incidence of poverty and landlessness. The second site, in Pabna, has a population of 3000 and is located in the central-west on the Ganges-Jamuna river basin and is prone to frequent flooding. The braided nature of the Jamuna River and its propensity to shift course during the rainy season, when the water flow reaches its peak, lead to frequent erosion of the river banks. Consequently, the incidence of landlessness and poverty is high as many people here have lost their residential and agricultural lands to riverbank erosion. The third village, in Panchagarh, has a population of 2200 and is situated in the upper northwest and falls in a drought-prone zone. Its location, dry climate, and sandy loam-type soil make it the poorest of the three. The three areas share almost comparable average levels of malnutrition: the incidence of underweight among children under the age of five ranges from 32 to 35% and stunting ranges from 39 to 42% (World Food Programme 2012b). I followed stratified purposive sampling and key informant interviews to recruit respondents for in-depth interviews and focus groups. The household types are broadly representative of the general population makeup of the three villages, and the final sample size was determined by the extent to which it captured the heterogeneity of responses. Interviews and focus groups with villagers were primarily unstructured to allow greater participation and elicit a thorough response; however, I maintained an interview checklist to keep the conversation focused on the topic. Once the interviews were complete, the data were transcribed and thematically coded for analysis. The composition of the households include: tenant holdings who rent land from landowners on a sharecropping basis or in exchange for cash or some combination of the two, owner-cum-tenant holdings who operate their own land as well as land rented from others, owner holdings who operate only their own land, and agricultural labor households who own no cultivable land and whose primary income comes from farm labor. The size of the agricultural landholding of approximately 70% of the interviewed households ranged between 0.5 and 2.49 acres. I interchangeably term these holdings small peasant households or smallholders. One caveat of this research is that I was not able to interview any fisher-folks in my first research site in Patuakhali where fishing is one of the major occupations. I have anonymized the responses of most interviewees except for those key public figures who wished to be identified.
Capitalist agriculture and malnutrition The 2008 Human Development Report of the World Bank opens with an emotion-invoking stereotypical narrative of a faceless “African woman”, whose identity we are not told, who seems to have transcended the diverse spatial and temporal boundaries of African states, and who has been handpicked to represent the imaginary “millions” of supposedly homogeneous women who live in Africa. The narrative reads,
Agroecology and food sovereignty as alternatives: issues, challenges, and opportunities For much of the past five decades, Bangladesh had to maintain a delicate balance between averting extreme hunger and famine on the one hand and advancing the capitalist development agenda on the other. Bangladesh’s past experience of famine and starvation in 1943 and 1974, leading to several million deaths, continue to haunt and shape its policy regime (Pinstrup-Andersen 2000). To minimize the recurrence of such catastrophic events, attaining self-sufficiency in rice production received tremendous attention, and food security emerged as the operative word in agricultural policymaking. Two particular aspects related to food security briefly require our attention here. First, at the time of its conception in the 1970s, food security was synonymous with increased food availability (Maxwell and Smith 1992). Following Sen’s (1981) research demonstrating that hunger could persist amid plentiful food supply, the FAO (1996) redefined the concept to emphasize the importance of “access to … safe and nutritious food”. However, since national self-provisioning through rice monoculture remained the preferred strategy, the later focus on nutritious food seldom found resonance in the policymaking arena. Second, the government’s preference for marketdriven means to achieve food security meant that for the majority of people, access to food was conditional upon the possession of monetary or other means. Nevertheless, the framing of food security in such terms provided the government with a strategy to reduce the prevalence of extreme hunger in a way that was also commensurate with its broader development agenda.