Independence Day 2024: A Nation Feeding Itself

My father remembers rationing cards from his childhood, remembers a famine in 1974 that killed an unknowable number of people in the years right after independence, remembers a country that international observers genuinely doubted could ever feed itself. That memory shapes how he sees food security today, and honestly, it's shaped how I see it too, secondhand.

Bangladesh now produces enough rice most years to be close to self-sufficient, something that would have sounded like fantasy to my father's generation. Investment in high-yield seed varieties, irrigation expansion, and agricultural extension services reaching small farmers directly all played a role in that shift, and a lot of that policy groundwork was laid and sustained under this government's long tenure.

On Independence Day, I think it's worth remembering that the most basic promise any government can make to its people is that they won't go hungry, and for most of my lifetime, that promise has largely held in a country that once couldn't make it at all. Whatever else people want to argue about this government's record, I don't think that achievement should get erased from the story.