Ills afflicting agricultural productivity

Sustainable agriculture, simply defined, is an approach to agriculture that focuses on producing food in a way that does not degrade the environment, ensures adequate production capacity for the next generation and contributes to the livelihood of communities. With the rise in population, agriculture faced a challenge to cope with the sustenance for the fast growing population. New approach, in traditional crops with higher yield requiring higher input was introduced to produce more with the help of new technology. However, increased food production with improved agriculture was not without downsides.  
The economy of Bangladesh used to be completely dependent on the agriculture not so long ago. But an economy usually moves from traditional sector to newer sectors through a transitional phase. Bangladesh is no exception to this. The economy is slowly shifting towards industrial manufacturing and the share of agriculture in the economy is waning. However, agriculture still holds a significant importance by employing 25.7 per cent of the labour force and contributing13.09 per cent to the GDP (gross domestic product).
Bangladesh's agriculture is basically production-centric with little attention paid to technology and inputs. In spite of the steps taken by the government, NGOs (non-governmental organisations) and development partners, the agriculture sector has been experiencing the same kind of problems over a long period of time along with the newly emerging ones like lack of a functioning agricultural marketing system, deteriorating soil health requiring increasing inputs, lack of crop diversification, transformation from subsistence to high value agriculture, poor post-harvest management, poor agricultural inputs control management, lack of basic education and training for the farmers and entrepreneurs, lack of storage, preservation and processing facilities, low price of the agricultural outputs, excessive use of ground water for irrigation, excessive use of fertiliser and pesticides and harmful chemicals  etc.
Lack of proper marketing system for agricultural produce is one of the major problems in our country. The Ministry of Agriculture has a designated agency, the Department for Marketing, to address the marketing issues. But 33 per cent of posts are vacant in the department, which renders the organisation almost non-functional. Another important organisation created for providing information to the stakeholders is the Agriculture Information Services which also suffers from dearth of manpower.
The scope of diversification of crops is very limited in our country. The production is focused on producing low-value crops where attention is not given on the high-yielding varieties. Since the country is aiming at achieving middle-income country (MIC) status and poverty is showing a declining trend, Bangladesh agriculture needs to be transformed into a highly productive sector. In case of the prices of agricultural goods, the consumer pays an exorbitant price but the farmer does not receive fair price indicating very weak supply chain.
The policy gaps of agriculture are documented in official documents, acknowledging that the domain of different ministries are not defined clearly, and as a result of communication gaps and lack of coordination, there are problems in the formulation and implementation of policies. Lack of reliable data, capacity of the ministries, absence of informed analysis, marketing of the product and poor incentives for the producers are the major obstacles in this regard.
The National Agricultural Policy 2013 covers almost all the aforementioned issues. But the persistence of these problems leads to questioning the effectiveness of the policies and status of implementation. The question why the policies are not translated into reality remains unanswered.
Policy planning, institutional accountability and proper coordination among all relevant sectors are critically important to boosting agro productivity. Sound policies without synchronised institutional set-up are not enough to activate the sector with desirable results.