Govt targets 13.30m tonnes of Aman output this season

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S M Jahangir
The government has taken up an integrated plan of action to boost the country's Aman output with the Department of Agriculture Extension (DAE) fixing a record target of 13.30 million tonnes this season.
"A comprehensive plan of action has been taken up to give a big boost to the Aman production in a bid to enhance the share of the second largest cereal crop in the country's total foodgrains output," a senior agriculture ministry official said Sunday.
Under the plan, necessary pre-cautionary measures have also been taken to ensure supplies of inputs like quality seeds and fertilisers to farmers this Aman season, the official mentioned.
He further said nearly 0.1 million tonnes of high-yielding variety (HYV) rice seed is to be supplied for this Aman cropping season jointly by the state-owned Bangladesh Agriculture Development Corporation (BADC) and the DAE and the private seed operators.
To help achieve the 13.30-million rice production target, the DAE has already earmarked 5.85 million hectares of land to come under Aman plantation in the current season, official sources said.
To help boost the per hectare output, the government has put stress more on plantation of HYV crop than on the local variety, the officials said.
"The DAE has fixed both Aman acreage and rice output targets for this season based on our country-wide filed-level assessments," a senior official told the FE.
Last year, the country's Aman output was recorded at 13.10 million tonnes against the target at 12.70 million tonnes, despite the fact that the crop was hit by a drought-like situation in the northern areas, the country's major rice growing zone.
Taking the last year's experience into account, the government has already divided the country's entire Aman cultivable lands into three segments - low-lying, plain land and high-land - to face any untoward natural calamities, as Aman cultivation is highly vulnerable to flooding.
Apart from that, the agriculture ministry has issued a directive to all upazila-level agriculture offices to provide all-out support for the sake of making the Aman cultivation successful.
The government's current steps, according to sources, aim to boost the overall rice output in a bid to help make the country self-sufficient in food-grain production.
The Bnagladesh Bureau of Statistics (BBS) figures showed that the country produced 36.93 million of tonnes of food-grains in the 2009-10 fiscal year while the production was 32.89 million tonnes in the previous fiscal.