Higher rice price may trigger bigger unrest

The government has cautioned that rice price will go up and announced that TCB trucks would sell rice at Tk 30 per kg to minimise suffering of low income people. The agriculture ministry at the same time is reportedly preparing a roadmap to boost rice production in two years using newly innovated high yielding rice variety to meet the increasing demand. This year aus, aman and boro production achieved record harvests and stock in the government godowns also claimed at all time high as per report. Yet rice price is rising and out of control raising question how and why it is happening.
Indeed, two factors are at work. Though rice production per acre is quite high now, land under production has significantly shrunk thus causing the overall production shortfall. Moreover new township development and rapid industrialisation have destroyed huge chunk of arable land. Therefore, we would say that the government should have a clearly spelled out land use policy to protect farming along with a time-bound specific plans to increase boro production. It should also accelerating production of aus and aman from next harvest season. Plans also should be taken to expand rice production in the hills, haors and adverse areas.
It appears that land scarcity is slowly affecting farming outweighing higher per acre productivity. We have reached a time when higher productivity is failing to keep price down. Moreover, rice production has become costlier due to higher cost of inputs and labour cost. So farmer can’t produce and sell rice at lower price. The prices of flour and other cereals have similarly increased to create a suffocating situation for buyers with limited income. It reminds us the famine situation of 1952 when enough food was available but buyers had lost affordability to buy. We don’t say that the country is heading toward such situation but it increasingly reminds us of the demand debacle.
We are afraid that food inflation now phenomenally rising may at one point destroy market stability if the government doesn’t take the issue seriously. Income gap between the rich and the poor is only widening so in our view the government should take various steps to put a brake to income erosion of the poor and middle income people so that they can buy food at reasonable cost.