With close to 9.0 million hectares of available cultivable land, which too is shrinking by around 2,500 hectares annually, thanks mainly to urbanisation, feeding some 175 million mouths is a challenge of miraculous proportions. But the farming community of the country has been successfully meeting the challenge so far. Obviously, extensive application of modern farm practices had helped achieve that feat. But, of late, new challenges emerging from climate change, rising input costs and other issues are coming in the way of the farming communality's ability to maintain the robust productivity they achieved so far. Despite their best efforts, the proportion of output in comparison to the inputs, is not increasing but falling. In other words, the returns are diminishing. According to a new study, styled, 'Perspectives on the Agrifood System in Bangladesh', carried out by a state research body and policy think tank, Bangladesh Institute of Development Studies (BIDS), the country's agrifood system growth, has begun to slow down with the 'total factor productivity (TFP)' levelling out. TFP is the output that a given sum of inputs including labour and capital can generate.
That means the country's agriculture sector which employs around 40 per cent of the country's workforce and shares an estimated 12 per cent of the GDP, has lost its growth momentum despite the fact that this sector, since 2000, has been able to achieve rapid labour and proactivity gains. The villain, as is well- known to everybody by now, is the climate variability with its increasing level of temperatures and erratic rainfalls resulting in crop failures and ever-declining yields of rice, wheat, pulses, vegetables and oilseeds. As reported, researchers, through their long-term modelling have projected that such decline in the yields of these vital crops will continue until 2050. It is no doubt a piece of bad news for the farming sector in particular and the nation in general. Actually, what experts have found out through their researches is identical to the experience being gained by the workers in the field by way of their daily struggles. As the extreme heat is forcing labourers to work for fewer hours, their daily earnings, as expected, have been falling in direct proportions. Unsurprisingly, the research findings also say that agricultural labour productivity, in the face of extreme heat, has dropped by an estimated 11 per cent. In some areas of the country that have been experiencing very extreme heat waves, the workers' earnings have dropped further by about 20 per cent, say reports.
As suggested by experts, an obvious way out of this low productivity trap is crop diversification on a wider scale, adoption of modern cultivation practices with the application of advanced technology and better risk management. But so far as crop diversification is concerned, there are certain constraints. For example, rice occupies about 80 per cent of the gross cropped area of agricultural land. Add to that the country's continued dependence on the imports of food items including some basic items including wheat, pulses, edible oil, dairy, etc. it implies that the nation's food system is exposed to global market volatility. The domestic food market, on the other hand, is also held hostage to the oligopoly of millers and big corporate interests.
Overall, it implies a constant challenge to ensuring the nation's food security. All these issues call for enhancing the country's agro-productivity through a right mix of modern farming practice and economical use of resources. Hopefully, through helping farmers and entrepreneurs to efficiently manage farm production and adopting a proper food policy, the government should be able to meet the rising challenge to the nation's food security.
