Arrival City_ How the Largest Migration in History Is Reshaping Our World - Doug Saunders [65]
As a result of this bizarrely distorted economy, the Londonis have expanded their holdings, to the point that they own almost 80 percent of the land, even though they represent only a third of families here. But they themselves have ceased to be farmers: More than 84 percent of their relatives are no longer directly involved in cultivation. Instead, they earn their income from shops, construction projects, transportation, and other sources and sharecrop out their land in return for a sum that seems negligible compared to their new wealth. Most families now harvest only one rice crop a year, employing between five and 10 people, and a small but significant number, perhaps 10 percent, have left their land uncultivated—an extraordinary spectacle in a country that suffers from severe food shortages and is a net importer of food.16
But agriculture is no longer always the most sensible way for villagers to make a living. It makes more sense for a small core of people to operate small or medium-sized commercial farms, a larger group to work as farm laborers, and even more to work in non-agricultural rural jobs—a transformation that the Banglatown arrival city is at least beginning to accomplish. The same “deagrarianization” of the village is being seen in the better-off parts of sub-Saharan Africa and the Middle East: The arrival city is urbanizing the village, both culturally and in its forms of economic organization.17
All the ingredients are present in Biswanath for a shift to more sustainable village life, with high-yield, high-employment commercial farms. The land has been consolidated, the infrastructure has been improved, and the sources of investment are present. But outward migration remains the central and overwhelming function of this village, and the largest investments are devoted exclusively to huge and sometimes preposterous monuments to migration itself. This sort of village, and the insensibly large houses and disused agricultural land that characterize it, are increasingly common in the parts of the developing world that are linked to Western arrival cities, notably in Mexico, in northern Africa, and in the Pearl and Yangtze river deltas of China.18
Yet this economy, and its characteristic forms of architecture and employment, are strictly products of the arrival city’s first generation. The second generation, the children born in the arrival city, have far less inclination either to send money back to the village or to build their status there; later generations are highly unlikely to continue such links. The question, then, is whether the flood of money and the shocking structural changes to the village can have a lasting effect once these direct physical ties are gone. Sylhet provides a useful test case, as it has experienced five decades of large-scale permanent migration to Britain. The steady streams of remittance cash have dwindled into occasional payments or strategic investments. The visits to the Londoni houses are increasingly infrequent. As the remittance money dries up, there is a sense that the displays of middle-class prosperity will fade. One scholar, after a detailed examination of a similar British-driven economy in Mirpur, Pakistan, described such villages as “a case of capital-rich underdevelopment” in which the prosperity is “only as stable as the continued inflow of remittances.”19
Yet villages like Biswanath seem far more likely to become functioning centers of commercial agriculture. For the moment, the incentive to do so is limited because of Londoni money. Beginning around 2000, dozens of elderly Bangladeshis began moving back from “London” to spend their retirement in Biswanath, bringing with them British state and private-sector pensions that are major sources of wealth by Biswanath standards. They will be the final generation to deliver this kind of money, and some people here, realizing this,