Wares Ali Khan :
The contribution of the agriculture sector to the macro-economy of the country, such as poverty alleviation, employment generation, and sustaining food security, is surely undeniable.
But due to imprudent paradigms undergone previously, the backbone of our country-agriculture-has been facing many hard-fought challenges for long. To ensure the adequacy of food supply for the growing population, improvement in the quality of life, and creation of employment, a greater degree of attention has to be paid to the country’s agriculture right away.
Currently, the size of the population of the country is some 176 million. Furthermore, 7,392 new faces are being added a day. Paddy is being cultivated in gross to meet the need for carbohydrates of the huge population and that is our crying demand.
The cultivation of other crops – pulses, oilseeds, vegetables, seasonal fruits, and roots is not being increased as expected in proportion to rice in a bid to ply total food security and nutritional demand. The other three sub-sectors of agriculture livestock, fisheries, and forests, are relatively being treated comparatively in lower volume.
The aforementioned sub-sectors, alongside crop varieties, must be scaled up in terms of production output in agriculture. However, a significant number of farmers are now applying assorted and modern mechanical, chemical, and agricultural technologies. Introducing biotechnology and utilizing hybridization needs to be in action on a large scale, too.
The increment in crop cultivation and application of excessive chemical fertilizers, herbicides, and pesticides is an increasing trend. Arbitrary use of pesticides in croplands and the mixing of various harmful chemicals in grains, vegetation, fruits, and fish are causing various types of cancer in the human body. On the other hand, helpful microorganisms, soil quality, and arable land are being destroyed slowly but surely by the systemic injection of agrochemicals.
Organic manure is the lifeblood of the soil. The soil might be barren and less productive due to the absence of necessary organic substances. The ideal organic nutrient for soil is cow dung. The use of organic fertilizers on land is a must for the preservation of organic particles in the soil. So, using organic fertilizers in the cropland must be introduced under the supervision of the concerned agricultural extension departments and agencies.
Good quality arable lands near many industrial areas of the country are under serious threat of losing fertility because of harmful substances and toxic particles. The untreated industrial waste is being mixed in rivers, canals, and marshlands. Water from those water bodies or reservoirs is being used in crop cultivation.
On account of that arable land is losing its fertility and productivity. Then again, heavy metallic substances like-lead, cadmium, chromium, etc., are being deposited in the soil of those areas through the dumping of industrial wastes, exacerbating acute health hazards.
In addition, there are no regions and product-based infrastructures to preserve perishable vegetables and other agricultural products conditioning high humidity and high temperature. Even our cold storage has not been categorized and modernized according to the need for a different variety of crops.
Emphasis should be given to integrated crop management systems to promote an environment-friendly agricultural modality. Likewise, unnecessary expenditures need to be reduced by identifying the areas of cost of production and marketing of agricultural products. This might help to ensure a fair price of the grown products for the peasants, and the consumers will be able to bag agro-goods at a competitive price and low cost.
The cost of agricultural production is sky-high. Furthermore, there are prevailing some passive grounds for the price escalation like market monopoly, instability, and price syndicate. Irregularities in government subsidies, agro-loans disbursement, absence of digital disbursement system of fertilizer, extra-scaled selling price of fertilizers, bribery, political corruption to demand spare money from hardworking farmers, and high interest in agriculture loans-these unsought issues must be repulsed for the sake of sustainable agriculture and easing longstanding deprivation of farmers.
The Central Bank has already undertaken to incentivize our farmers rendering with an expanded loan dealing window, and comprehensive rural development of a summation of BDT 38,000 core in the 2024-25 fiscal year, indicating a target of 8.7 percent, which is higher than that of previous consecutive years. It is surely a laudable move to understand the perspectives and prevailing financial crises of the struggling peasants.
It is to be noted that many of the farmers cannot store crops due to debt. They are to sell their grown products immediately after production and repay the loan installments or debts. Mobilizing money in the form of loan disbursement and allowing a lenient mode of payment to repay the debts, there must be a flexible provision. Providing long-term monetary incentives, cash support, and stimulus packages are the subjects of paramount importance.
Agro borrowers should be perceived and accepted through the humanitarian lenses and humanist perspectives. Especially framers who fail to repay loan installments following a deadline need to be understood genuinely and identically as a unique case assessing their understandable difficulties. An earlier evidence of putting rope on the wrist must not be repeated which notoriously exemplified the breaching of humanity in the immediately past regime of the fascist government.
Confronting the predominance of vested quarters and brokers must be addressed through a fast-track helping window and a quick support system to beat unwanted harassment of loan disbursement and agro allocations from government-assigned entities and offices. Credit disbursement by rightful scrutiny for proper allocation must be accomplished through the respective bank branches, sub-branches, agent banking channels, Mobile Financial Services (MFS), and contract farming modality to meet target beneficiaries seeking money.
Getting reasonable prices of the grown food products for the peasantry, rendering basic agro-training to educate farmers, disseminating framing-knowledge, and serving with agro-equipment for them, breaking up the market monopoly and price syndicate, diminishing the interference of middlemen and partisan corruptions are the major catalysts to augment food production sufficiency and thrive our agriculture sector anew as well.
(The writer is an academic and edu-entrepreneur. He can be reached at [email protected])