DACCA, Bangladesh— The very name of the country, Bangladesh, stirs images of misery and, in the minds of most Westerners, the perennial poverty here is the result of some inexorable Asian fate.
Cyclones, floods, war and, above all, overpopulation are blamed for the destitution and malnutrition in this fertile alluvial delta, one of the most crowded places in the world.
Some 90 million people are jammed into a country roughly the size of Wisconsin and, in the last six years alone, women in Bangladesh have produced 14 million more mouths to feed - more than the entire population of Australia.
Despite this Malthusian presence, however, Bangladesh is probably now producing enough food to provide an adequate diet for every man, woman and child in the country. And the agricultural potential of this lush green land is such that even the inevitable population growth of the next 20 years could be fed by the resources of Bangladesh alone.
Why, then, is malnutrition still endemic? And why is the agricultural potential still largely unfulfilled? American diplomats here tend to prefer the explanation that Bangladesh is the victim of a cataclysmic combination of overpopulation and recurring disasters. But most of the longtime aid officials in Dacca strongly believe that hunger would not exist in Bangladesh except for an inefficient, still largely feudal economic and social structure.
This system, it is generally agreed, is limiting the amount of food that can beju produced and keeping the food that is available from being consumed by those who need it the most.
Food aid officials here privately concede that only a fraction of the millions of tons of food aid sent to Bangladesh has reached the poor and hungry in the villages. The food is given to the Government, which in turn sells it at subsidized prices to the military, the police and the middle-class inhabitants of the cities.
Moreover, agronomists and relief workers here say that the skilled rice farmers of Bangladesh have neither the means nor the incentive to improve the country's own agricultural productivity.
Much of the land here is sharecropped by tenants who have to split whatever crops they produce 50-50 with the landowner. Yet the tenant has to pay the full cost of production. Under such arrangements, few tenants can afford the cost of the new seeds and fertilizers that are necessary for improved crop yields.
Even within these constraints, Bangladesh may well be producing much more food than existing statistics indicate. Agricultural production figures in particular tend to be understated, reportedly because the numbers are used to justify the Government's annual requests for food aid. Deficit of a Million Tons
According to official statistics, and using 15 1/2 ounces of rice as a minimum daily requirement for a person, the country has an annual food deficit of roughly one million tons of grain. But recent research by the Bangladesh Rice Research Institute found that actual production was significantly higher than the Government estimates.
''The country is probably producing enough food to be selfsufficient already,'' said Hugh Brammer, a senior official of the Food and Agriculture Organization who is currently an adviser to the Ministry of Agriculture.
By implication, that would mean that hunger is far less severe here than has previously been reported. The last official nutrition survey was in 1975-76, when it was discovered that almost 60 percent of the population was malnourished, compared with 45 percent 20 years earlier.
Since that time, however, the country has had two good crop years and grain reserves are at an all-time high of 1.4 million tons. Survey work has just been completed on a new nutrition study, and Dr. Kamaluddin Ahmed of the Institute for Nutrition and Food Science at the University of Dacca, the director of the survey, said in an interview that his field researchers had the impression that people throughout the country were eating better than they did in the 1970's. Nevertheless, Dr. Ahmed and other medical personnel interviewed here stress that malnutrition is still widespread.
Recent trips in various parts of the country confirmed their statements. A two-hour visit to the village of Nolan, some 22 miles west of Dacca, with Rukia Rahman, a 23-year-old paramedical worker, disclosed a baby with night blindness, a result of vitamin A deficiency, a malnourished 10-month-old girl and a pregnant woman with the swollen ankles produced by eclampsia, a nutrition-related disease. Most Eat Two Meals a Day
Most of the villagers said that they ate two meals a day, puffed rice and gur, a molasses-like syrup, in the morning, and rice and fish at night. On another morning, a group of foreign consultants traveling some 100 miles north of Dacca stopped for a midday snack of tea and cheese biscuits. Within minutes, a crowd of some 15 children had gathered to watch, prompting one woman to mutter, ''I should learn you can never have a picnic in this country.''
As she was putting the tin back in the van, it spilled, scattering the biscuits all over the ground. Within seconds, one of the children had scooped up all of the food and vanished.