Govt to buy 20m gunny bags for food storage
Talha Bin Habib | Monday, 10 March 2014
The government will purchase 20 million gunny bags from public and private sources for storage of food grains, a high official said.
With this end in view, the Directorate General of Food (DGoF), which is under the ministry of food, has started buying gunny bags from Bangladesh Jute Mills Corporation (BJMC).
So far it has bought 10 million bags from the state-owned BJMC out of 15 million. The price of each bag is fixed at Tk 69.
The private sector will also supply 5.0 million bags. The DGoF is now evaluating their quotations.
The rice and wheat procurement drives by the government sometime face problems due to not having gunny bags in time from the suppliers.
Meanwhile, the government has decided to double its ongoing Aman rice procurement target to 0.4 million tonnes from the original 0.2 million tonnes that prompted it to buy such bags.
"We will be able to buy the estimated number of gunny bags since we are getting good response from the public and private sectors," a deputy director of the DGoF told the FE Sunday.
Bangladesh is one of the top five rice producers in the world and produces about 34 million tonnes of rice annually.
Consecutive bumper harvests have made the country almost self-reliant in rice production this year, and local sources say that the government is increasing the storage space to help ensure food security.
According to government sources, Bangladesh is targeting to increase current food grain storage capacity of around 1.2-1.7 million tonnes to 2.0 million tonnes by 2015 and 3.0 million tonnes by 2020.
According to the food directorate, Bangladesh's average annual demand for food grains - mainly wheat and rice - is about 35.0 million tonnes, in which rice shares 31.0 million tonnes.
The public food storage capacity has been enhanced to 1.8 million tonnes recently. The country's stock should be between 1.5 to 1.6 million tonnes. Of this, rice should be 1.0 million tonnes.
And with the Aman procurement drive, public storage will increase, according to the food department.
The present stock of food grains is 950,000 tonnes. Out of the quantity, 730,000 tonnes are rice and the rest wheat.