In Pursuit of Development

Bangladesh: How a ‘basket case’ became a development pioneer – Naomi Hossain

Episode Summary

Dan Banik and Naomi Hossain discuss Bangladesh’s remarkable but contested development journey — from famine and fragility to growth and global recognition. Together they explore how politics, crisis, and collective learning have shaped the country’s progress, and what its experience reveals about resilience, accountability, and the moral economy of development.

Episode Notes

Bangladesh is often described as one of the great development success stories of recent decades. Poverty has fallen sharply, life expectancy has risen, and millions of women have entered the workforce. Today, however, that narrative sits uneasily beside new questions about data reliability, the cost-of-living crisis, and deepening inequality. What explains this paradox and what does Bangladesh’s experience reveal about how societies learn from crisis?

In this episode, Dan Banik speaks with Naomi Hossain, Global Research Professor in the Department of Development Studies at SOAS University of London. A political sociologist, Naomi’s work examines how people living with poverty and precarity secure the public services they need, and how states can be held to account. The conversation revisits the Bangladesh’s turbulent early years: the 1970 Bhola cyclone, the liberation war, and the devastating 1974 famine that killed over one and a half million people. Out of those traumas emerged a political and moral consensus that food security and disaster preparedness had to come first. From there, Bangladesh built a foundation for growth through innovation in health, education, and social protection, and through a society that proved remarkably adaptive and resilient.

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Episode Transcription

Dan Banik:
Naomi, it’s been years since I last saw you in Oslo. Wonderful to have you on the show. Welcome.

Naomi Hossain:
Thank you so much. Yes, I think it’s been over 10 years.

Dan:
I’ve wanted to have you on for a long time. Lately I’ve been thinking about all the depressing stuff, but even in this gloomy world there are development positives – and we don’t talk enough about them. One of the oft-cited successes is Bangladesh. So, to get us started: is Bangladesh a development success? I know you’ll probably say yes, but help us understand how.

Naomi:
I would say yes. But it’s become controversial in the last year and a half. Calling Bangladesh a success implies that the recently ousted Awami League government under Sheikh Hasina, in power for 15 years, did some things right. That’s hard to say publicly now. There’s also new evidence of overstated indicators, particularly growth. We don’t yet know how much was falsified, but there was fuzziness. Still, the reduction in poverty through the 2010s and into the early 2020s was real; those numbers are harder to fudge.

More recently,especially since 2022 with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the global cost-of-living crisis, Bangladesh was hit hard: few natural resources, heavy energy imports, and costly, often corrupt energy contracts. Many people suffered, and poverty has worsened in the last couple of years.

But we need a longer historical view. When Bangladesh was born in 1971, Henry Kissinger called it a “basket case”: no resources, 10 million refugees in India, massive displacement, decimated infrastructure, no functioning state, and severe food insecurity, after decades of (neo)colonial rule that siphoned off higher value-added activities.

Over 50 years, Bangladesh turned itself around. For me, the critical turning point was the 1974 famine. After that, an elite consensus emerged around what the country needed to do. The first priority, often ignored in summaries of my work, was to build protection against natural disasters and food crises. Just before independence, the 1970 Bhola cyclone killed perhaps half a million people. No one even counted properly. Then came the 1971 war, with hundreds of thousands killed and mass sexual violence. In 1974, famine likely killed around 1.5 million people (Muhyiddin Alamgir’s study makes this case).

Bangladeshis were extremely vulnerable to floods, cyclones, and hunger. The foundation of later success was investing in disaster protection and food-crisis response to reduce the likelihood of mass hunger. Only after that came the growth story: garments, openness to global markets, and so on. Without that initial protection, we’d still be stuck in 1971.

Dan:
On the data side: beyond poverty reduction, many agree there were clear gains in health – child and maternal mortality, infectious diseases – plus the Grameen story, women’s empowerment, and the apparel industry. Much of this happened under both authoritarian and democratic governments. What, in your view, did the Hasina government get right?

Naomi:
They did some things right. As analysts of the politics of development, we need to tease out what worked and when it started to go wrong. The government saw itself as a kind of developmental state: relatively authoritarian, pushing growth through infrastructure – bridges, roads, expressways. If you visited Dhaka in 2010 and again in 2025, it’s unrecognizable. Still traffic, but massive new infrastructure. They expanded power supply, though via contracts that were corrupt and costly, draining billions—a lot for Bangladesh.

Development also happened because people want to develop. Given a little space, people grew on their own. Later, however, crony capitalism took over. The banking sector became fragile; large politically connected businessmen took loans and siphoned money abroad. Combined with the cost-of-living shock, the economy was on its knees by the end.

What they did right: cumulative small-scale social innovations—health, education, and social protection programs like small pensions and allowances for pregnant women and schoolchildren—often delivered digitally via mobile money (bKash). These amounts were modest but signaled that government was reaching out: “Send your kids to school; get vaccinated; here’s a small transfer.” Signaling on women’s rights and violence against women also mattered—more rhetoric than implementation, but not unimportant.

On microfinance: the critical literature is important, but often overstates. In the 1970s–80s, with no social protection and constant shocks, people needed cash. Microloans reduced vulnerability for poor rural women. Whether they reduced poverty is debatable, but reducing vulnerability isn’t nothing. Garments employed many women in hard, low-paid jobs—but it changed horizons and options.

Dan:
I’ve noticed that shift too: from uncritical praise a decade ago – Nobel Peace Prize and all – to stronger criticism, especially of practices outside Bangladesh. I want to return to your argument in The Aid Lab: elite-level political settlement rooted in the war, famine, and disasters. If I recall, your threefold argument was: (1) elites recognized they had to cooperate to survive (an elite bargain); (2) they accepted the need to provide a basic floor of social protection; and (3) they had to “play ball” with the international community. Aid in the 1970s–80s was something like 6% of GDP. Going back to 1974: despite the high global attention—Beatles/Ravi Shankar, Peter Singer’s “Famine, Affluence, and Morality”—why did 1.5 million people die? Rising rice prices? Incompetent domestic response? What happened?

Naomi:
We can talk about Peter Singer. His essay seeded effective altruism, which has a lot to answer for. On the elite consensus: after the famine peaked in 1974, Sheikh Mujib abolished the constitution, created a one-party state, repressed rivals, and was murdered in August 1975 with his family—a brutality that still reverberates. After 1975, an elite consensus of sorts emerged—not from a formal pact, but as shared baselines: above all, prevent mass starvation.

This region has a long history of famines, many linked to British policies that distorted markets and livelihoods. Elites realized you cannot develop if people aren’t eating. Economist S.R. Osmani wrote in the 1980s that Bangladesh’s development problem was a food security problem. USAID helped shape food policy, with successive governments targeting food aid to the rural poor. The social protection was very basic—about staving off disaster, not building a well-nourished population.

On turning to the international community: the early 1970s vision—socialist, secular, non-aligned—didn’t last. Bangladesh couldn’t stand alone: no resources, hungry population, disease, devastation. A key moment was 1974, when the US withheld food aid while people starved. Why? It’s murky. Kissinger, then Secretary of State, had long favored Pakistan and disliked Bangladesh. The formal reason was Bangladesh’s small trade with Cuba, violating PL-480 rules against trading with communist nations while receiving US food aid. But those rules were bent for others (e.g., Egypt) when it suited US interests.

There was also “triage theory” circulating in Washington policy circles—Paddock brothers, Garrett Hardin’s lifeboat ethics—a Malthusian view that some countries would never cope and should be left to fail. So, the US had an excuse and little strategic interest. The result: Bangladesh pivoted to accepting aid with IMF conditionalities—devaluation, restructuring.

Dan:
Hardin was essentially saying: we have ownership of what we produce; we’re not morally obliged to share. If others “over-reproduce,” that’s their problem—we have limited seats on the lifeboat. I see echoes of this now in MAGA politics and in parts of Europe: “us first, solidarity later—or never.”

Naomi:
Exactly—“us first,” or solidarity only when convenient. I recently wrote about the moral philosophy behind aid cuts, revisiting lifeboat ethics, triage, and Singer. Today’s justifications invoke “effectiveness,” which traces to Singer’s maximize-good logic—but stripped of structural analysis. Now, with USAID being dismantled, you hear: fewer resources, so sharper priorities, more “effective” aid. But for many in power, effectiveness is moot; they simply don’t like what aid does.

Dan:
One related point: on that “basic” social protection idea, I’ve argued—at least in India—that governments accept people living below the poverty line and act only when they start dying and the famine threshold is crossed. Chronic deprivation is tolerated; acute crisis finally triggers response. In Bangladesh, people were dying months before the famine was officially declared.

Naomi:
You’re right: the politics of chronic malnutrition versus starvation are very different. What doesn’t cause a political crisis sees slow action. People starve in a famine because they’re already hungry; it isn’t instantaneous. Watching Gaza now, many have learned (or re-learned) how famine unfolds. By any reasonable characterization, Gaza is a famine—mass starvation as a weapon of politics—perhaps comparable in its political use of hunger to a few other historical cases.

Dan:
How important are memories of the 1974 famine in Bangladesh today?

Naomi:
Fascinating question. The Aid Lab came out in 2017 (OUP). I couldn’t get it published in Bangladesh then—the famine is sensitive for the Awami League because Sheikh Mujib was in power. My view is that it wasn’t malicious—more incompetence and incapacity—compounded by the lack of food aid. Still, he was in charge, so it’s sensitive. After Sheikh Hasina fled in August 2024, a publisher (UPL) brought out a local edition with a new introduction.

When I spoke about the book, I found a whole generation knew almost nothing about 1974. They knew of the 1943–44 Bengal famine, partly because of Zainul Abedin’s famous sketches. But there’s little public art or memorialization of 1974; some drawings have surfaced in private collections. Public memory is thin; private memories exist. After I wrote about the famine, people began sharing their stories. At a big investment summit earlier this year, Professor Yunus invoked the famine—his team had read my work—and recalled how far Bangladesh had come. Among the triggers for Grameen, he has said, was witnessing starvation and asking what use economic theory is when people are dying in front of you.

Dan:
And, of course, others—Amartya Sen, Rehman Sobhan—carry memories of the 1943 famine (Satyajit Ray’s film Ashani Sanket, etc.). Your point is that elites resolved never to allow famine again—even if some toleration of starvation deaths remains.

On the third strand of your argument—the international dimension: today Bangladesh receives less aid than before, though still some. Aid agencies love attribution—claiming poverty fell because of them. But we know domestic politics matter most. How would you characterize aid’s role in Bangladesh’s development?

Naomi:
Aid’s role was experimentalism. Michelle Murphy’s work on the “economization of life” overlaps with my timeline: Bangladesh became a site for social and economic experiments. At the macro level: what happens if a resource-poor country opens to global markets and focuses on exports? We saw a broadly neoliberal regime with weak labor protections. Aid was indeed conditioned on liberalization and privatization from the 1980s. Food aid kept the country afloat.

Bangladesh’s population is relatively homogeneous and densely settled—useful for trialing and scaling interventions. Some experiments were transformative: oral rehydration therapy saved millions from diarrheal death and was pioneered and refined in Bangladesh. Others were social innovations—cash transfers for schooling, microfinance—piloted, then exported (with mixed results elsewhere). For years, Bangladesh was the aid world’s poster child. Today, the experimental frontier has shifted to climate—mitigation and adaptation—though poverty, deprivation, and hunger persist.

Dan:
Bangladesh now has a transition government; Muhammad Yunus is Chief Advisor. Elections will come. I often worry about state capacity. To what extent is development driven by the state versus the private sector, the garments industry, the diaspora, or major NGOs like BRAC? Is the state outsourcing its work? How might this shape the next decade?

Naomi:
State capacity is crucial. Many of us who study state–society in Bangladesh agree: historically a weak state, strong society (to borrow Sarah White’s phrase). Under Hasina, the state got stronger—but also more captured by the ruling party, which can make governing “easier” for an authoritarian administration. There’s a tendency to let the private sector deliver services: creeping privatization in education; health is already heavily privatized. As public services are perceived as low-quality or corrupt, more people buy services in the market.

Looking ahead—climate change, democratic restoration, AI and the global economy—it will be a real test for the state. One advantage: Bangladesh learns from crises. After floods, factory collapses, or mass movements, you see institutional learning. But my big concern is that the post-mid-1970s elite consensus has frayed. Today’s elites are more socially, religiously, and politically diverse; the shared incentive to invest in poverty reduction and food security is weaker—partly because the younger generation has no famine memory. That missing consensus is what worries me most.

Dan:
We’ll have to leave it there. Naomi, this was a pleasure. Thank you for coming on the show.

Naomi:
Thank you. I really enjoyed it. And yes. We still have more “famine talk” to do. We are, after all, the “faminists.”

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