Restructure agriculture to bridge the food gap and contain price hike
With prices of rice, wheat, edible oil, pulses and vegetables rising every day, the spectre of food grains import stares the country in the face. This happens in a country where agriculture is the mainstay of people's living. The country has till now 70 per cent of its workforce in farming though agriculture's contribution to GDP has dropped from about 30 per cent in the '80s to about 15 per cent now. The crisis was brewing up long before but in the uproar of banal politics dominated by self-serving politicians, all such bad signals were not taken heed of. The country only woke up to this crisis when food prices started rising up in the market.
Unhappily, due to bad weather conditions like drought followed by recurring flood, the country that for some years boasted of producing enough food to feed its people, has to import food grains almost on a regular basis. The reason for this crisis is that there have been no breakthrough or new investment in seed technology to improve farm yield. Consequently the country is currently witnessing the worst year in the Bangladesh agriculture since 1975.
Agriculture now faces a crisis of cultivable land for food grains which has shrunk as more and more agricultural land is being used for non- agricultural purposes. Whether it's any industry, highway or expansion of cities and towns agricultural land is being used. The profitability from the land under agriculture has not increased as land ceilings have become smaller and investment is negligible. This sector is also reeling under a crisis of water as it remains heavily dependent on monsoon. Mitigating water crisis through pump irrigation has become uncertain due mainly to power shortage. There is disincentive among the rural farmers to get involved in agriculture, which appears to promise only an uncertain livelihood and crippling debt. Other farming sectors have also suffered and farmers have taken a beating.
Ill-conceived policies of the previous political governments coupled with market manipulation by interested quarters dealt a stunning blow to all sorts of agricultural practices starting from jute to sugar cane cultivation. Jute, once known as the golden fibre of Bangladesh that in earlier days figured prominently by fetching huge chunk of foreign exchange earning is now on the memory line of the Bangladeshis. Sugar cane cultivation in recent years has faced severe jolt because mills cannot buy sugarcanes from the producers on cash for lack of funds and sugar already produced by the mills cannot be sold in the market because of import from other countries without making any assessment of the actual need and without giving priority to the marketability of local production.
Sadly true, there are inherent dangers when a nation turns obsessive about politics. The truly vital concerns get obscured. Politicians are supposed to provide good governance. Instead they prefer jousting with one another and matters of governance get sidelined. Exactly this is what the past alliance government did. As a result it is the poor rural folk and middle class people in the urban areas who are most affected. .Already existing on the brink, inaction pushes them over. Agriculture today in Bangladesh is a grim story of neglect and apathy.
In Bangladesh today land is not only scarce but untillable also because of saline intrusion and long water logging after the floods that have become a routine annual event. The reason is apparent. Despite the fact that there has been a huge increase of about 75 million extra mouths to be fed since the days of liberation of the country in 1971, there has not been any major investment in infrastructure for agriculture in the past decade. With the past governments remaining unresponsive and oblivious of the grim future, the country now bleeds and the economy sinks.
Agriculture today needs diversification and innovative thinking. It needs to find jobs for those who are under-employed, to discover and implement a market approach to agriculture. The reason behind the present sky-rocketing price of food items and essentials is the result of systematic neglect and failure in attaching proper importance to agriculture. Even 36 years after independence, 80 per cent of the farmlands are still dependent on good monsoons for reasonable crop production. Efforts to increase the area under irrigation in the past years have been an abysmal failure. Irrigation fields in most places of the country during the Boro season totally dependent on power driven deep or shallow tube wells ran dry. People have noticed that dual crisis of fertilizer and water brought the farmers on the rampage almost in all parts of the country. In most places the Boro crop which is critically fertilizer dependent withered away.
The unmitigated crisis has now ramifications such as bringing about shortfall in rice production, a situation that forced the present government to import food grains in a larger quantity. It's worth noting here that because of drought situation and natural disasters world wide in the past few years there has been a major setback in food grains production even in most of the major food grains producing countries. One report reveals that India, once known as a major food grains producing country had to import 10 million tonnes of food grains this year. More eloquently stated, India so long known as self sufficient in food grains production produced only 200 million tonnes of food against an annual requirement of 210 million tonnes.
According to a report published by FAO, the food deficit in the world this year is the highest since 1970.The food grains stock in the US this year is the lowest over the last 26 years. Australia, the biggest provider of wheat to Bangladesh which produces the largest quantity in the world, about 2.5 crore ton annually, produced about 1 crore 20 lakh ton last year because of drought and consequently Bangladesh has failed to procure sizable amount of wheat from that country. Mentionably, Bangladesh's total requirement of wheat per year is about 36 lakh ton and even with the best of inputs available, the country can produce 6 lakh ton annually.
Despite their best efforts , the present CTG's effort to augment the situation has not as much succeeded to brighten people's lives because it now faces a daunting list of problems that has inevitably been a legacy of the past government. On the advice of the chief adviser, advisers of the concerned ministries visited their areas and the grim story of their experiences, presented in a report and published in the dailies, tells of the price hike resulting from non availability of goods. There is shortage of fertilizer in the rural areas and it will affect 'rabi' crops and the report further says that there is no chance of the food prices coming down before March next year.
In the light of the bitter experiences of the past few years in the food domain, sensible citizenry feel that the country has to go away from import driven economy and develop its own food security system. Admittedly, there is scarcity of water and it will continue to torment the farmers in every sowing season because of the global warming trend disrupting normal climatic pattern in all parts of the globe. The government must consider setting up a National Rainfield Authority to find out how best to conserve water in the drought affected regions and to come up with a time- bound plan. Maybe, it would take some years to boost irrigation facilities and implement an effective watershed management in these places, but a beginning should be made.
For the government, problem that stands out as the most major impediment is the lack of any technological breakthrough in agricultural production technology in recent years. More importantly, there has been no technological breakthrough in either high-yielding varieties or hybrid seeds that could match the quantum jump. You can't be happy with the technique and process you had been using when the population was just 75 million in a situation when it has jumped to 140 million. Crop rotation and replenishment of micro- nutrients must be ensured to help restore fertility. There has to be optimal use of fertilizers without overdose of nitrogenous nutrient. This necessitates the development of market and infrastructure for making seeds available to farmers. And topping it all is the need to make institutional credit available to farmers so that they can make use of the improved technology.
But all these measures need to be geared up by experts in the agriculture sector and Bangladesh may follow the Gujarat line of action. Gujarat in India, the highest producer of oilseeds in that country, has enhanced its agricultural production by almost one and a half times in the last five years through a multi-pronged strategy. The turnaround came because of efficient agro-management based on conservation of surface water, providing scientific information to farmers and disbursement of soil health card to every farmer. Tapping of surface water has been achieved by building 1.77 lakh farm ponds, and 1 lakh check dams in private-public partnership and deepening 5000 village lakes, which has sent the water table soaring. The present state of affairs in the agriculture sector calls for taking any inspiring instance.
In the rocky road ahead, the present government having no political bias and imbued with a welfare oriented philosophy on governance issues will have to take the initiative and play a dominant role in reviving the country's agriculture before it is too late.
Since the 1980s, Bangladesh has been a country mostly dependent on agriculture gradually supported by technology but because of our failure to give proper thrust in this sector, the rural landscape unveils a shocking litany of poverty, joblessness and deprivation that continues to drag the country down. The oft- preached growth of 5.3 per cent rise in the GDP has hardly made any dent on poverty. The oft-repeated Green Revolution of the 80s has definitely gone brown.
Hopefully, after 30 years of inaction the World Bank, the biggest credit institution in the world created to eliminate pockets of poverty from every part of the world ridden by natural disasters, war and ethnic conflict, that so long diverted its funds to infrastructure development in the country has woken up to the reality. The World Bank's contribution to agriculture in its bid to bring down economic disparity between rural and urban Bangladesh, it is learnt, will rise to 310 crore US dollar in the current fiscal year. It remains to be seen how this money is going to be utilized.
To be precise agriculture together with manufacturing forms the backbone of the economy and its performance is crucial in the battle against poverty. As we have seen, our approach to poverty alleviation is often seen illogical and perverse. We attack poverty through subsidies along with many schemes and measures that are only palliative. If the amount spent in such haphazard ways was invested in public works, such as irrigation canals or wells, small dams, water harvesting projects, high yielding variety seed bank, and rural ponds as a source of clean water as well as fish cultivation and above all houses for the rural poor, it would have triggered multiplier effect and transformed the economic landscape of the country.
Md. Asadullah Khan is a former teacher of physics and Controller of Examinations, BUET.
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