Demographic Change and Food Production in Bangladesh, 1960-74

Abstract

Bangladesh, the eighth most populous country in the world, provides an acute illustration of the recent concern over the precarious global balance between food supply and rapid population growth. A new nation with about 76 million people inhabiting 142 thousand square kilometers of land, Bangladesh is the most densely settled rural nation in the world. The economy of Bangladesh is overwhelmingly dominated by agriculture; it contributes over two-thirds of the gross national product and absorbs over three-fourths of the labor force.' Despite the predominance of agriculture and a presumption that there are classic comparative advantages to food production in Bangladesh, the country has consistently imported a significant fraction of its foodgrains, a fraction that has mounted in recent years. Production was seriously disturbed, moreover, during and immediately following the War of Independence of 1971, and the country has been plagued by cyclones, monsoon failure, and flooding almost without letup since 1970. These difficulties in agriculture have occurred over a period when domestic demand for food was growing rapidly, generated in part by a population growth rate of about 3 percent per annum. Efforts over the past decade to curb this rapid growth rate have met with only very modest returns. An ambitious national family planning program begun in 1965 when Bangladesh was a province of Pakistan was recently acknowledged to be a failure, achieving contraceptive practice among less than 5 percent of eligible couples.2 Demographic projections show that even optimistic reductions of fertility would lead to a doubling of Bangladesh's population