Among all the countries receiving agriculture and nutrition assistance through the U.S. government’s Feed the Future initiative, Bangladesh receives the third most, at approximately $50 million a year ($55 million has been requested for 2017). Yet Bangladesh’s population is larger than that of the two countries ahead of it, Tanzania and Ethiopia, combined.

“We must invest our taxpayer dollars wisely, and Bangladesh is a wise investment,” said Janina Jaruzelski, the U.S. Agency for International Development’s Bangladesh mission director, on September 9 at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS).

A team from CSIS’s Global Food Security Project recently travelled to Bangladesh as part of an effort to better understand the strengths and weaknesses of Feed the Future’s investments in the country. Following a report on Feed the Future assistance in Tanzania earlier this year, Bangladesh is now the second country to be evaluated as part of the Global Food Security Project’s Tracking Promises series.

Feed the Future offers agricultural and nutritional assistance to promote long-term food security in 19 developing nations. Bangladesh has proved an able development partner, according to the report, and provided many lessons USAID can apply globally, achieving a consistent economic growth rate of six percent and self-sufficiency in its rice harvest. Yet chronic malnutrition remains a major problem.

“Great Hope and Promise”

At the report launch in Washington, DC, Global Food Security Project Director Kimberly Flowers said their decision to evaluate Bangladesh was easy. It has one of the largest portfolios of Feed the Future investments and is “often held up as a model.” Jaruzelski called it “a place of achievement as well as a place of great hope and promise,” and suggested Bangladesh’s continued development is geopolitically salient for the United States, given the insecurity of the surrounding region.

The Bangladeshi government has consistently “demonstrated commitment at the highest levels” to eradicating food insecurity, according to the report. Its detailed 2006 National Food Policy served as a launching pad for Feed the Future programming, and highlights what a remarkable policy partner the government has been throughout the process. While many countries have begun to make food security a national priority, it is rare for governments to present a specific vision for how to achieve it and put these plans into action with strong backing from leadership

Matt Curtis, deputy director of USAID’s Office of Economic Growth and Feed the Future Bangladesh’s team leader, said six years after it became one of the first countries to receive assistance, Bangladesh is now completely food secure in rice production, producing enough rice to feed its population of 161 million. This is no easy feat, given the country’s extreme vulnerability to the impacts of climate change.

Every year, between 25 to 75 percent of Bangladesh gets hit with flooding. Salt water often saturates crops and inundates city streets for months on end, threatening the livelihoods of farmers and their families, a documentary released along with the report explains. While rice production has been steadily improving over the past 40 years, Feed the Future has introduced technologies that help farmers maintain and improve on this momentum in the face of climate change.

So far, Feed the Future programs have trained 1.97 million farmers to increase their yields – by using better quality seeds, applying fertilizer more efficiently, and irrigating fields more effectively. To cope with salt-water intrusion and frequent flooding, new, higher yielding saline-tolerant rice varieties have been introduced as well.

Ishrat Jahan, chief of party of the Accelerating Agriculture Productivity Improvement Project at the International Fertilizer Development Center, noted that rice, vegetable, and maize production has greatly improved. Over the past four years, Bangladesh has seen overall agricultural productivity increase by five percent and production increase by eight percent.

Household surveys have also measured a 16 percent decrease in poverty in areas receiving Feed the Future assistance, according to Akhtar Ahmed, a senior research fellow at the International Food Policy Research Institute. While it is still difficult to determine how much of this reduction can be attributed to USAID programming, the preliminary data is encouraging and points towards commendable success, he said.

Room for Improvement

There is still room for improvement, particularly when you look beyond overall yields toward nutrition. While preliminary data shows there has been a 12 percent drop in childhood stunting in Feed the Future zones, many of the panelists said the current numbers still do not bode well.

The average Bangladeshi gets three quarters of his or her daily calories from rice, a dangerous lack of dietary diversity that can lead to stunting, or slower and smaller than average growth for children, a key symptom of chronic malnutrition. Ahmed said four fifths of children do not receive an acceptable diet for their age range and 36 percent of children under the age of five are stunted nationwide. Yet currently less than one fifth of Feed the Future’s budget is targeted towards fighting malnutrition, Flowers says in the documentary.

The report calls for a better balance of programming to address these problems. Curtis attributed the discrepancy to Feed the Future’s initial focus on productivity, which led to the prioritization of closing the yield gap above all. However, access to markets is just as essential to addressing nutritional challenges, as this ultimately determines the quality and diversity of people’s food.

The government of Bangladesh hopes to achieve middle-income status by its 50th birthday in 2021, and the goal seems feasible. But unless more targeted programming is introduced, especially for young people and women, chronic malnutrition will continue to act as a hand break on economic development and the accrual of human capital.

At the report launch, Curtis said USAID would “continue to have success if we implement [Feed the Future programs] in a strategic and targeted way,” and suggested that a multi-sectoral approach to nutrition, one that integrates women’s empowerment initiatives, might have the greatest impact because of the link between female empowerment and improved nutrition. Other recommendations include better linking farmers to financial services, investments in climate-smart agricultural technologies and more efficient irrigation systems, as well as additional research to determine the direct impacts of Feed the Future programming.

Jaruzelski said “one of the great joys in working in Bangladesh is that it is a place where meaningful change does happen, where tangible change is visible, and where money when invested intelligently really does make a difference.” Perhaps in its second phase of Feed the Future funding, Bangladesh can lead the way once again.