For more than three decades, the Bangladeshi political left has maintained an unyielding stance on natural resources like gas, coal, and minerals, insisting that state entities must develop them exclusively.
Foreign energy companies are viewed with deep suspicion, while production-sharing contracts are routinely condemned as vehicles designed to siphon national wealth to foreign multinationals. Coal extraction, particularly open-pit mining, has drawn even sharper resistance.
Few figures have championed this doctrine more consistently than economist Anu Muhammad and his National Committee to Protect Oil, Gas, Mineral Resources, Power and Ports. Their long-standing campaigns have influenced the nation’s media narrative on energy.
By transforming projects like the Phulbari open-pit coal mine into lightning rods for outrage, they have successfully framed energy deals with outside capital as existential threats to national ownership.
To be sure, their environmental objections warrant rigorous examination. The Phulbari dispute raised acute questions regarding mass human displacement, farmland destruction, groundwater depletion and ecological ruin.
As Anu Muhammad reaffirmed recently, resource extraction cannot be plausibly classified as development if it dismantles local agrarian economies, ecosystems and human habitations.
Yet the left’s stance becomes intellectually fragile when legitimate environmental advocacy hardens into an indiscriminate hostility toward foreign capital and technical expertise. Bangladesh can no longer afford to treat its national energy discourse as an abstract seminar or a street protest over political purity.
The country faces an acute energy crisis. Daily gas demand is around 3,800 to 4,000 million cubic feet, while domestic production provides barely 2,600 million. Shrinking domestic reserves have forced the state into dangerous over-reliance on imported liquefied natural gas (LNG).
This import dependency has proven very costly. Recent geopolitical volatility across Middle Eastern supply routes has pushed Asian spot LNG prices to eye-watering highs.
Bangladeshi manufacturers now endure persistent supply curtailments and rolling power outages, while the treasury absorbs sharp fiscal burdens. Over 40% of the nation’s power generation currently hinges on imported LNG, severely undercutting industrial expansion.
This is why the old dogma on foreign exploration must be re-evaluated. Left-wing commentators persistently offer BAPEX, the state-owned exploration entity, as a viable solution.
Strengthening state capabilities is undoubtedly a worthy goal; BAPEX possesses valuable localized geological insight, technical personnel and operational infrastructure. But bolstering a national oil company is fundamentally distinct from shutting out global energy corporations.
Consider deep-sea exploration in the Bay of Bengal. High-seas drilling demands immense capital expenditure alongside extreme financial risk. A single offshore exploratory well can easily absorb hundreds of millions of dollars without yielding any commercial discoveries.
While nationalizing that risk carries rhetorical political appeal, the state remains fully exposed when costly wells come up dry. International oil majors exist precisely because their global balance sheets can absorb such losses.
Bangladesh has spent years learning how challenging it is to lure global energy majors. Despite restructuring production-sharing terms to offer lucrative blocks across the Bay of Bengal, major tenders have repeatedly failed to attract a single international bid.
Rather than triggering a serious debate regarding contractual competitiveness, geological data sharing and regulatory predictability, public discourse predictably degenerated into binary slogans pitting national sovereignty against foreign exploitation.
The left’s historical skepticism regarding flawed energy contracts is not entirely unfounded. Bangladesh has previously suffered under opaque power purchase agreements, exorbitant capacity charges and emergency quick-rental power schemes that effectively transferred public funds to politically connected domestic elites.
The fatal flaw, however, lies in leaping from specific contractual failures to a generalized rejection of all foreign involvement. A competent state does not cede its future by retreating from global markets; it uses robust statecraft to bargain effectively within them.
Examples from other developing and developed economies offer valuable lessons. When India negotiated its landmark civil nuclear accord, domestic communist parties launched fierce political opposition, citing lost strategic autonomy.
India pushed forward regardless, recognizing that ideological opposition to foreign partnerships frequently prioritizes geopolitical identity over systemic energy security.
Similarly, Germany’s rapid transition away from nuclear energy, largely driven by the country’s socialist left, met harsh realities after European supply shocks, forcing the state to hastily build LNG import terminals, temporarily extend nuclear assets and reactivate coal capacity.
Bangladesh faces far tighter financial constraints. Every scarce dollar funneled into emergency LNG purchases is a dollar diverted from infrastructure, education, social welfare and health. True national sovereignty is not defined by isolationism or insistence on doing everything alone.
It lies in the state’s capacity to manage complex risks: balancing domestic capabilities with foreign capital, diversifying import dependencies and enforcing rigorous environmental standards on foreign and domestic operators alike.
Resource nationalism offers no answers when factories run out of power today. Governing an energy-strapped country requires replacing ideological purity with hard-headed pragmatism. That means fortifying BAPEX while inviting global investors, maximizing domestic natural resources and accelerating the renewable transition simultaneously.
Faisal Mahmud is a Dhaka-based journalist and managing editor of Daily Waadaa.
