Dr Stephen D Biggs, who has recently died, first arrived in Bangladesh in 1973. This obituary is compiled from various tributes which his daughter, Korina, received after his death. He was among a group of scholars and volunteers who had previously been in Bihar, North India, and came on to Bangladesh soon after its Liberation to support its early years of rebuilding, including Edward Clay who was with the Agricultural Development Council (A/D/C) in Dhaka and myself at Bangladesh Academy for Rural Development (BARD), Cumilla, both enabled by Stephen.
He graduated in agricultural economics from Wye College, University of London, followed by MSc studies at Illinois and PhD coursework at UC Berkeley. He completed his dissertation by developing an input-output model to understand green revolution transformations in agriculture in the Kosi River Area, North East Bihar, India, while at the Institute of Development Studies at Sussex University (1969-73). This was the foundation for pioneering contributions to rural development and wider development policy and action. He listened well to farming communities. From the outset, he was focussed on understanding a system, not just individuals, thus a departure from household and farm focussed methods of investigation.
These studies defined Stephen as an agricultural economist, but he was so much more. He was determined that his research should inform policy. He was a mentor to a network of younger colleagues around him: broadening their perspectives, connecting detailed research with the desire to improve people's lives, and the value of inductive approaches applied to immediate farming solutions as the initial phases of the Green Revolution got underway in South Asia. As a colleague, mentor and teacher, then and throughout his career, he embodied such a modest demeanour. He exemplified knowledge as common property not private. That is how he lived his professional career.
Thus, equipped with his qualifications and applied research experience from Bihar, in 1973, Stephen joined the Ford Foundation in Dhaka, as a programme officer in a small team led by George Zeidenstein, with Lincoln Chen as a colleague. The three of them enabled the Ford Foundation to punch above its weight in terms of policy influence, supported by analysis. They supported both government and emerging NGOs. With government, they funded and advised agricultural research through Bangladesh Agricultural Research Council (BARC) and Bangladesh Agricultural Research Institute (BARI), as well as directly with ministries of agriculture and rural development, including the continuation of the Foundation's pre-Liberation support for BARD at Cumilla—the action-research centre for linking institutional and technological innovations. There, they funded research on cooperatives (the KSS) and the dangers of their elite capture, as well as the dangers of new forms of exploitation as capitalism entered farming. They partnered with the A/D/C. They also provided scholarships for studies abroad, including, for example, the former vice-chancellor of Bangladesh Agricultural University at Mymensingh, Prof Sattar Mandal, who recalls Stephen facilitating his PhD studies at Wye College. Mandal praises Stephen as having a continuously "inquisitive mind to understand why some technologies work while others don't." Also, during this period, the Foundation provided significant seed funding to emerging NGOs, such as BRAC and the Grameen Bank initiative. The significance of Stephen's four years in Bangladesh is perhaps best summed up this way:
"'One international organisation always came up with unhesitating support whenever I asked for help, ever since my days at Chittagong University. This was the Ford Foundation: Lincoln Chen and Stephen Biggs … had each come up with flexible ways of assisting our work."
This recollection comes from the autobiography of Muhammad Yunus, founder of the Grameen Bank, Nobel Prize laureate and presently chief adviser of the interim government in Bangladesh. Not many bideshi in Bangladesh have acquired that kind of accolade! Stephen's support for social as well as technical innovation was continued soon after he left Bangladesh with the Foundation's support for PROSHIKA's landless irrigation programme.
In 1977, Stephen and his family went on to CIMMYT (the CGIAR wheat and maize centre) in New Delhi for three years. During this period, Stephen was also learning about Nepal (see below). The family moved to Norwich in 1980, where Stephen joined the School of Development Studies at the University of East Anglia, continuing after retirement in 2003 as Research Fellow until 2013. There, he had a strong teaching and writing collaboration with Prof Frank Ellis, who remembers Stephen as an energetic and highly motivating teacher, taking students into rural Norfolk to see real farming, a revelation especially to overseas students. During this period at the University of East Anglia, Stephen visited Bangladesh on assignments several times, thus keeping in touch with its steady agricultural transformation, topping up his empirical knowledge for his various publications.
In the late 1990s, Stephen began his close involvement of over 20 years with Nepal, being in Kathmandu for lengthy stays and travelling widely in both the hills and across the Terai region. There, he combined personal contentment among new friends with his ongoing professional gratification: small machines! He was too sensible to see hand-held power tillers and mobile pump sets as the magic bullet, but he did become almost evangelical. As he carried on writing from this era of applied research, notably with Scott Justice and also with Sattar Mandal, the small machine mission became stronger. Barbara Harriss-White from Oxford, recalling SOAS Agrarian Change seminars, notes "his steadfastness in showing how small machinery can transform agriculture. He was awakening South Asian policymakers to how small-scale farming and informal economies worked." He thus connected to the strategic debates about whether the small family farm had a future, which continues to be a focus of research for Mandal and Wood. Scott Justice sums up this part of Stephen's life with: "small engines always put a smile on his face."
Stephen was more than a university teacher and researcher. He was a wonderful gardener, a regular and great jive dancer, passionate about a capella singing and would play his flute without inhibition in cafes and other venues, including for extremely ill friends in nursing homes. Many at his funeral recalled such moments.
To conclude, Stephen's continuing strength was being inductive rather than narrowly deductive. He was inter-disciplinary almost before the term existed. He has been a fine academic, the best sort. Open and generous with his ideas and insights, keen to apply knowledge to the real world of struggling, insecure, farmers on the relentless edge of disaster, and keen to see the social benefits of productivity-enhancing technology for the little guy. He had no time for the wiles and dark arts of the institutionalised academy. He just wanted to help poor people. His presence will be sadly missed.
Dr Geof Wood is a development anthropologist and author of several books and numerous journal articles, with a regional focus on South Asia. He is also emeritus professor of international development at the University of Bath, UK.
Edward Clay writes from Brighton in the UK.
Views expressed in this article are the authors' own.
Follow The Daily Star Opinion on Facebook for the latest opinions, commentaries, and analyses by experts and professionals. To contribute your article or letter to The Daily Star Opinion, see our submission guidelines.
