Stephen Biggs obituary

The Guardian

28-03-2025

My former colleague, Stephen Biggs, who has died aged 83, was an agricultural economist whose work focused on India, Bangladesh and Nepal.
In the 1970s, as a programme officer at the Ford Foundation office in Bangladesh, he supported, with funding and advice, social experiments within government departments and among NGOs that could help small farmers access technological innovations (such as mobile pump sets for irrigation and small-scale power tillers) through cooperatives and small businesses.
In 1977 he moved on to the crop improvement organisation CIMMYT, in New Delhi, supporting innovations in maize and wheat production across the South Asian region. In 1980 he joined the Development Studies School at the University of East Anglia, Norwich, continuing after retirement in 2003 as a research fellow until 2013.
From the late 1990s he focused increasingly on small farmers and small-scale technologies in Nepal, and lived there for lengthy periods over two decades. He travelled widely in both the hills and across the lowland Terai region, combining a personal contentment among new friends with his ongoing professional mission: to encourage the use of small machines.
He was committed to showing how small machinery could transform agriculture, awakening South Asian policy makers to how small-scale farming and informal economies worked. He thus connected to ongoing strategic debates about whether the small family farm has a future.
Stephen was 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 institutionalised academia. He just wanted to help poor people.
Born in Hadley Wood, Enfield, north London, he was the second of the three children of Rodney Biggs, a milliner with a hat factory in Soho, and his wife, Betty (nee Chaddock). The family moved in the postwar years to Hurst Green, East Sussex, where Rodney ran a grocery store. Betty died when Stephen was 11 – he was then sent as a boarder to Sutton Valence school in Kent.
After gaining a degree at Wye College, London University's centre for agricultural sciences in Kent, he travelled to the US, for an MSc at Illinois and a PhD from UC Berkeley in California, on agricultural systems in north Bihar, India as the green revolution was transforming peasants into farmers reliant on complex supply chains and becoming market oriented.
At Wye College, he met Sally Windett, and they married in California in 1968. They settled in Brighton with their daughter, Korina, and in 1969 Stephen became a research fellow at the Institute of Development Studies at Sussex University. He and Sally separated in the early 80s and later, at UEA, he met Venetia Nuttall-Smith, whom he married in 1986.
After her death in 1997, during his years living and researching in Nepal, he immersed himself in Buddhist teachings. He sang in many choirs, and loved jive dancing, playing his flute, birdwatching and beekeeping.
He is survived by Korina, and by his brother, Marsden, and sister Pene.