Agriculture continues to be too vital for the food security of Bangladesh and its macro economic stability. Growing imports of food products with the country’s rising forex reserve had been possible in the past. But such imports climbing and stressing the reserve on a regular basis, could seriously strain the country’s macro economy or balance of payments position.
Needless to say, the record of production of the basic staple-rice-has been particularly good in recent years. There has been no need to import any notable amount of rice in the last three years. Government is even considering the allowing of export of some quantities of fine or aromatic rice from Bangladesh. This is an unprecedented or matchless record of the country’s agricultural performance. Sound governmental policies as well as favourable weather have worked to make this happen. However, the current successes in rice production do not provide any absolute guarantee that production at the present level will underwrite the country’s food security long into the future.
Experts are impressed with the present rate of production but they say that productivity will have to be continuously raised for meeting future challenges on a sustainable basis. The population of Bangladesh was some 75 million in 1971 but this population is over 160 million today or more than a doubled one in over four decades. The annual average of rice production was some 11 million tons in 1971which has increased to 26 million tons in recent years depending on normal production without facing natural calamities. But still, even in the last decade, food grain production at intervals was found short of total effective demand by at least half a million tons on average which had to be met by imports.
The country’s population would likely increase by some 20 million in the next twenty years and food grain production must at least rise proportionately to go on maintaining a balance between population growth and food supply. But agricultural lands are being put increasingly into non agricultural uses. Some 20 per cent of agricultural lands have been lost from this process during the last 30 years, according to one estimate.
In this situation, only increasing the per hectare yield of food grains seems to be the way forward for Bangladesh to keep on matching higher demands with adequate supplies. The present average output is about 3 tons per hectare which must be raised to 5 tons. This is possible because Bangladesh’s soil fertility is good. Countries such as Japan and Korea with less fertile soil are growing 5-6 tons per hectare. There is no reason why we cannot match or surpass the productivity of these countries given the facts that we possess a much greater comparative advantage compared to then in them in the form of highly fertile soil and better weather conditions too.
The Bangladesh Rice Research Institute (BRRI) has so far invented 47 new higher yielding varieties of rice. But only a handful of them have been popularized although there are at least a dozen varieties which can yield substantially higher outputs than the ones which are being cultivated. The Department of Agricultural Extension (DAE) needs to maintain regular liaison with BRRI and undertake a countrywide programme for the new varieties of seeds developed by the latter to actually find widespread field level applications.