Development of agriculture

IN major agricultural countries of the world, the government operates policies flexibly or delicately to retain high incentives for farm production. Governments in the USA and European Union (EU) countries buy up wheat from farmers at subsidised prices to prevent its price from falling or discourage production to keep prices at a certain level. There is hardly similar intervention in our context or if there is, the same is not so efficient. Therefore, in order to really develop agriculture, the government in Bangladesh needs, on one hand, to give greater attention to providing such price supports to farmers extensively and, on the other, to go on helping the process of modernising agriculture.

The countries that did very well in agriculture invested a great deal at the outset on modern agricultural education. Bangladesh has had its lone agricultural university at Mymenshing for many years, a few agricultural colleges and the Bangladesh Agricultural Institute (BAI). The extension of agricultural education through the country's mainstream secondary and higher secondary education system are confined mainly to token activities. Clearly, such meagre facilities for modern agricultural education for a nation of over 140 million are very inadequate. Therefore, to reap big dividends from agriculture in the future, investments in agricultural education must be increased substantially.

Abu Imran

Naya Paltan, Dhaka