A Leader from the Future

Today was the first day at office after Sir Fazle Hasan Abed passed away. This morning while preparing for my office, I was desperately looking for a small coat pin. This coat pin among others, was one of many emotional connections that I had with Sir Abed.

This in fact was a simple small coat pin with a flying bee, having "save the bees!" printed on it. I received this coat pin as a souvenir from the visiting team of ministry of agriculture of the republic of Slovenia during my very early days at BRAC. While I am saving this for the later part, let me first share my first encounter with Sir Abed at BRAC.

Sir or Bhai?

I first met Sir Abed during a one to one session with him as a part of my orientation after joining BRAC. It was mostly a monologue where he was narrating his idea on agriculture and food security in the country as one of the pillars of SDG (sustainable development goal). During the session I was naturally addressing him as “Sir”. At one point he paused and told me that I could address him as “Bhai” as everybody called him “Abed Bhai”. I politely refused saying that he earned the title “Sir” and I was to respect his achievement by appropriately addressing him “Sir”. We addressed people as Sir most of whom did not even deserved to be addressed as Sir. So, I requested him if he would allow me to continue addressing him as Sir. To this point he smiled and said, “up to you”. From that moment on till last I used to address him Sir not Bhai and he did not mind that.

The Third Eye!

I had a very limited personal interaction with Sir Abed. I did not have enough appropriate forum for that. I missed the golden time when he was actively involved in almost everything and interacted with people intensively. By the time I joined BRAC in late 2016, he was pursuing the next big things for BRAC.

When I got a chance to accompany him during a field trip to Mymensingh, I was more than delighted. I thought of using this time to interact with him. My dream fell flat as he was always surrounded by people during the entire visit. As agreed with Tamara Apa (Tamara Hasan Abed, Managing Director, BRAC Social Enterprises), I wanted to discuss informally some of the sensitive issues on enterprises to get his mind. Some of these issues were kept on hold by executive body.

So, at a very opportune moment I put one of the issues of getting into crop protection segment of business for Seed & Agro Enterprise. My logic was to provide seed to seed solution to the farmers to ensure desired crop yield, as the farmers were using non-brac solution of crop protection and often blaming our quality of seed. This was we could guarantee the farmers their fair return on investment. To my utter surprise, he instantly agreed to my idea and asked how much time I needed to start. I told him that after getting formal approval from PCC (Program Coordination Committee) it would take about three years to launch our first product in the market. He suggested me not to put that to PCC but directly to EMC (Executive Management Committee) to which he was the Chair.

In next two hours of the trip he called my twice and made me sit beside him to discuss crop protection business. First he suggested me to look for a partner to join hands so to cut-short the three years time. Second he even told me look to buy out or acquire a running chemical plant or a pharmaceuticals company so to save time. While I was thinking only on starting the crop protection segment of the business, through his third eye Sir Abed was looking at bigger impact BRAC could make in the agriculture sector.

A Leader from the Future!

I accidentally landed up being the focal person of “Bee Keeping” pilot project for BRAC. You can read more about this to my earlier post here https://www.dhirubhai.net/pulse/apiculture-how-i-saw-elephant-beehive-slovenia-mohammad-anisur-rahman/

In this project BRAC partnered with Ministry of Agriculture of the Republic of Slovenia to bring the bee species from Slovenia to Bangladesh to test their suitability in our environment perspective. We entered into a formal agreement to that effect and soon after twenty bee colonies flew from Slovenia to Bangladesh. As this project was one of his pet projects, so I went to inform Sir Abed that the project was on course and the bee colonies arrived in Bangladesh and were deployed for the study. 

While to most of us, this would be a simple and straight-forward pilot project. Study the suitability of the imported bee species and if the pilot was successful, we could scale this up among the farmers for harvesting honey. But Sir Abed was a person from the future, and he saw which we generally could not (or would not) see. He saw the future of Bangladesh’s agriculture through bee keeping. While he was very happy with the news and photographs of deployment of bee colonies, he painted a scary future for our agriculture. 

In next thirty minutes or so, he told me that the bees were getting extinct from our agricultural system. Lack of good species, poor genetics and indiscriminate use of insecticides and pesticides were the main causes of the extinction. He told me that bees were extremely useful for pollination of crop and good pollination ensured better yield for the crops. If there were not enough bees, the crop pollination would depend solely on birds and wind flows which were less effective compared to bees. So, with the ever-increasing population and decreasing arable land, getting better yield from the cultivation was the key to achieve food security in the country. Therefore, our future of agriculture was dependent on these small species and BRAC needed to popularize this into the agricultural system.

Getting out from his room, through this pilot project of twenty bee colonies I could see the future of our agriculture.

Sir Fazle Hasan Abed may have left us physically, but he is always with us through his vision, his work, his spirit, his legacy. It is now our turn to take his legacy forward. It is our promise to be worthy of his legacy. [Dhaka, December 23, 2019]