Protect farmers to protect agriculture

A national daily on Friday published a lead story captioned ‘Farmers are yet to get reasonable price of paddy’ highlighting the perils of the people who produce food for the nation. It said after Boro harvest in April, many farmers are returning their produce from market unsold as its price is below production cost and at half of the government fixed procurement price. The rice market is being further destabilized with continued rice import at low cost from India despite imposition of 10 percent import duty from May 10 this year. Nonetheless, Bangladesh has imported 14.60 lakh tonnes of rice so far during 2014-15 and Letter of Credits (L/Cs) for import of another 16.0 lakh tonnes is in hand. It is reported that the government has fixed the target of procuring 10 lakh tonnes of rice and one lakh tonnes of paddy in this Boro season. But its total procurement so far stood at 2.32 lakh tonnes of rice without any mentionable amount of paddy leaving the farmers totally exposed to the vagaries of cheaper dumping of Indian rice in Bangladesh. It is advisable that the government must accelerate its public procurement drive to give farmers a fair price of their produce.Moreover people wonder why the government is allowing imports of rice and not putting in place preventive measure either, except some import duty having no impact to stop imports. Bangladesh is currently producing enough rice to make even some limited export after meeting domestic demand. But some influential merchant houses are relentlessly importing rice from India to help the disposal of its unsold stock. It is feared that if the situation continues farmers may be forced to switch to other non-crop farming and this may in turn bring setback to Bangladesh’s self-sufficiency in food production and food security. It is noticeable that India has almost dried the supply of cattle herd across the border causing a beef crisis in Bangladesh market. They are using religious reservation to slaughtering of cows for meat; although Prime Minister Narendra Modi made it clear during his recent visit to Dhaka that they are totally opposed to religious fundamentalism. Many people here wonder as to why the government is not protecting agriculture. At least this will not be any religion-based decision. Moreover, it is not properly understood why the government is neglecting agriculture; which is evident from reduced allocations to agriculture in the proposed budget when agriculture is still the backbone of rural economy providing jobs to rural population. Rather the government attention is found more focused on possible domestic unrest from farmers’ anger that the opposition may exploit as several intelligence reports warned. Those reports including the report of a team of the Special Branch of Police alerted the Home Ministry with information collected from 15 districts about the risks of agitation while farmers’ concerns remained almost unheeded. What is noticeable is that police are now working to monitor agricultural market, although it is not their job, while criminals are moving at large and killing people almost on daily basis. Moreover, why our intelligence is not alerting the government about the impact of cheaper rice import is yet another question. It must be noted that the country must do everything to save our agriculture and the farmers at any cost.