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Paper short abstract:

What is the Bangladeshi version of the agrarian question? Is the family farm disappearing in favour of a rentier-contractor model for agriculture as waves of new capital intrude into post-feudal and minifundist modes of production? How do redistributed profits and rents underpin new politics?

Paper long abstract:

Quasi-feudal and small peasant legacies for Bangladesh at its liberation 50 years ago have been transformed especially through introduction of a late winter irrigated high yielding rice crop (irri-boro). Bangladesh now faces 3 competing agrarian trajectories: continuation of the family farm as petty commodity producers; steady spread of large-scale commercial farms, owned by corporate agri-business, using large scale equipment oriented entirely to producing for national and even overseas markets; thirdly a specifically Bangladeshi hybrid, combining ongoing attachment to land but with owners and tenants becoming rentiers, i.e. ‘leasing’ out their scattered plots for consolidated operation and efficiency gains to commercially provided agricultural services. Given heterogeneity of land tenure, including a new class of small tenants using other sources to access land, such services are provided at two levels of significance: larger more commercialised contractors; smaller local service providers-cum cultivators, renting out surplus operating capacity to neighbours.The paper predicts versions of the third option as a function of the socio-cultural affinity with land, reinforced by a weak state, whereby existing owners prefer to lease out rather than selling and new entrants thereby obliged to rent in land rather than purchase.These combined conditions lead to the hypothesis that the classic image of the family farm is being disarticulated through the intrusion of capital into agriculture and the agrarian system is being re-articulated into a rentier-contractor scenario.The agrarian question is whether this represents an early stage of an eventual Kautsky type outcome, underpinning an emerging urban delta & new sets of political interests.