APPLICATION OF SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY TO BANGLADESH'S TRADITIONAL SECTORS

As already noted, Bangladesh's level of domestic savings is far too low to finance the technological transformation intended by the government. The agronomists and agricultural-research institutes consulted during this review were of the strong opinion that the agricultural sector would not remain prosperous and would be unable to contribute to the economic surplus required for Bangladesh's modernization without a major effort to apply Science &Technology to the needs of this sector.
The history of Southeast Asia shows that in many countries agriculture has been the early engine of domestic savings and set in place the conditions for unprecedented economic development. Malaysia built its economic growth on its application of S&T to assist in its exports of rubber and oil palm. Thailand traded rice, timber, maize, and cassava exports to build the foundations of its industrialization. Indonesia blended cash crops with timber and petroleum products to fuel its engine of progress.
Most of the agricultural scientists, researchers, and producers we consulted expressed deep concern that Bangladesh's national Science &Technology policy neglects and may continue to neglect the potential to develop the country through the modernization of its traditional sectors of agriculture, forestry, and fisheries. In reviewing the Science &Technology policy documents available to the international team, we noted good reason for this concern. Current S&T-strategy documents emphasized four areas of economic-development focus over the next 25 years — IT, biotechnology, new materials, and automation — as the foundation concerns for the nation's future industrialization. The documents contained almost no mention of how Bangladesh would produce the required domestic savings or of a phased strategy involving deliberate application of S&T to the economic and social resources in which Bangladesh now has, from all evidence, a large and distinct comparative advantage. In the view of the Mission, there is a risk here of serious policy failure. A sequence of a national S&T strategy that simultaneously builds each successive step on those that have gone before would begin with the evolutionary development of several of the country's basic economic sectors and then stress the modernization of the nation's industrial base.
The view of many people, therefore, was that the development of a primary-product strategy should be geared to providing Bangladeshi agricultural, fisheries, forestry, and livestock products to regional and global export markets. The concomitant S&T strategy for the social and economic development of Bangladesh's natural-resource base should be centered on two major goals. First, the country should liberalize and apply the productive energies, enterprise, and skills of Bangladesh's primary-product producers and its rural private businesspeople and investors to meet the needs of a modern primary-product economy. Second, the country should establish conditions to attract foreign investment to complement domestic efforts to create an advanced agribusiness infrastructure.
However, we also encountered strong objections to any S&T–economic strategy according priority to the traditional sectors. Such objections tended to come from economists, rather than from scientists. The largest doubts rested implicitly on despair over any prospect of improving Bangladeshi agriculture, as a result of its small farm sizes and its backwardness. The international team found it difficult to entertain these objections seriously, as development models based on successful primary products were launched under virtually identical conditions in the neighboring countries of Southeast Asia, a region with characteristically very small, intensively cultivated farms.
We also heard the contentions that the agricultural-product market is fraught with quality and price barriers that Bangladesh cannot hurdle. In fact, the market for high-value Bangladeshi products — such as fruits, vegetables, fish, and livestock — has really not been assessed or tapped. For successful entry into this market, the national development strategy must be built on a post harvest food-processing infrastructure that prepares, packages, and handles these perishable products to make them a valued item in regional or global markets. In the process of pursuing sales in these markets, it may be useful to seek the help of large multinational food and agricultural-product export firms to assist or, if possible, invest in developing an international market for Bangladeshi high-value food products.
Such a strategy would use the excellent array of technologies already developed by Bangladesh's agricultural, crop, livestock, and fishery research institutes and universities. Because of the disaggregated and disbursed nature of primary-product production, the strategy must also enlist the active participation of the domestic private sector as a source of business investment. Private initiative can provide the entrepreneurial talent and investment funds required to build a modern agribusiness complex to serve producers and to create and operate the post harvest processing systems required to meet international-market standards for food and cash-crop economies.
The technical foundation needed to expand the output of Bangladesh's farms to supply new markets is available. The weakness of the national economy to accommodate such an S&T–economic-development strategy lies in the relatively primitive infrastructure of its food-processing and farm-supply sectors. The obvious requirement here is investment in storage-facility, processing, packaging, and preservation technologies to meet the quality standards of the international market.
The technologies needed to initiate a transformation of Bangladesh's rural economy are, for the most part, already known and available. What is lacking is an appropriate incentive structure to launch and support their application. This is a core issue for national policy and central to a successful S&T strategy.