Govt to build more food grain warehouses to help farmers: Razzaque
The government will build more food grain storages in order to help farmers store their produces during peak harvesting season such that they can reap benefit of fair prices and contribute to food security, said Agriculture Minister Muhammad Abdur Razzaque yesterday.
He unveiled the plan at an event where the Department of Agriculture Marketing (DAM) took over all 81 food grain warehouses from the Local Government Engineering Department.
Running a loan-against-storage programme, the warehouses, each of 250-tonne capacity, offer loans to farmers against storage of their grain. Farmers can avail a maximum 80 per cent of the price of the stored grain as a bank loan.
Farmers can sell the stored crop when prices rise to pay off the bank loan alongside a warehouse rent. The monthly rent is Tk 10 per 100 kilogrammes of food grain. This rent covers operational costs while the surplus is collected in a fund.
Loans amounting to Tk 804.91 lakh have been disbursed among 4,365 farmers against an annual deposit of 4,921 tonnes of food grain.
According to the DAM, the loan recovery rate is 98 per cent.
The DAM had owned 12 of the warehouses while the rest were being run by the Local Government Engineering Department (LGED). They are spread across 56 upazilas of 26 districts in the Rangpur, Sherpur, Magura and Barishal regions.
The DAM had sent a proposal to take ownership of the remaining 69 warehouses and the Ministry of Local Government, Rural Development and Cooperatives agreed.
The transfer was made through the signing of a memorandum of understanding (MoU) between the Local Government Division (LGD) and the Ministry of Agriculture at the latter's premises yesterday.
A separate MoU was also signed for the construction of training centres for farmers in 106 upazilas in 47 districts under eight divisions.
The DAM said these centres would be constructed within 2022 under a farmer training (phase-3) project for technology transfer at the upazila level of the Department of Agricultural Extension.
It also said the centres would give an institutional shape to training for farmers and it would be easier for farmers to organise training on time.
This will facilitate the expansion of modern agricultural technology in the field at a faster pace, the DAM said.
Addressing the signing, the agriculture minister said food grain storages would be built across the country as the loan programme has attained success and gained popularity among farmers.
The training centres will also be expanded to develop the livelihoods of farmers, he said.
Local Government and Rural Development Minister Md Tajul Islam said the training centres would help modernise the agriculture sector, bring qualitative changes and enable the adoption of technology.
He believes this initiative will help farmers avail technology and enrich their knowledge.
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