Rats can be found everywhere in Bangladesh. From crop fields to sewers, garbage bins, food warehouses, factories, restaurants, offices, shops and homes, rat infestation is everywhere. Their reproduction rate is also very high. A pair of rats can produce more than 1,500 offspring each year. They are particularly a challenging pest in rice cultivation as they remain a problem all the way from sowing to harvesting rice. On an average, rats cause losses of 10-20 per cent of rice. In Bangladesh, every year rats damage crops worth Tk 29 billion approximately. They may eat away around 5-10 per cent stored grains. In rural areas of Bangladesh, rat damage can reach up to 30 per cent loss. The government of Bangladesh has recently launched a rat-killing drive in the country. We hope people from all walks of life will participate in the drive.
Rats are a sly and silently-destructive mammal. They can live on any sorts of foods/grains. They can adapt to any environment too. They also chop down the young seedlings. At booting stage, they eat away rice panicle. During ripening stage, they eat away rice grains. Rats carry diseases like plague, typhoid, jaundice and a number of skin diseases, and pose a health risk to people. They can also be incredibly destructive. Apart from granular crops, rats damage fruits, books, furniture, clothes, electric wires, machinery and various types of installations. They make holes in roads, embankments, and railway lines.
In Bangladesh, farmers use conventional methods of poisoning rats to save their crops, but its effectiveness is questionable. Therefore, in order to increase our crop production and to protect public health, it is time to treat the problem of rats as a national issue and make the rat-killing campaign across the country a success. Effective community control measures could be: 1) flooding, digging or fumigating rat burrows, 2) using dogs to locate active rat burrows, 3) setting local kill-traps along runways of rats, 4) using registered rat poisons, 5) keeping the areas around the fields, home, and grain stores clean.
Dr. Md. Ruhul Amin,
Head of Agriculture Investment Division,
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