Growing potato in the season of blockade-hartal

Shihab Sarkar | Published: March 15, 2015 00:00:00 | Updated: November 30, 2026 06:01:00

Potato piled up on the roadside

There are occasions when grand prospects or big achievements end up in great disappointments. This is what happened to our potato growers this year. Despite a bumper yield, most of the regions that have cultivated the crop are now in the doldrums. Barring Rangpur and some other surrounding districts, many areas which have seen potato yield in profusion are now reeling from the shock of unexpected losses. They are not getting back even the investment they have made in potato growing, leave alone profits. The field-level prices offered are below the production costs.
Seeing the photographs of distraught growers in newspapers cannot but sadden one. Most of the photos show the farmers sitting beside piles of their produce in the very field where they have grown it. Potatoes in vast tracts of fields remain uncollected. In a weird twist of fate, the potato growers have been caught in the debilitating trap of the blockade-hartal programmes. They do not feel like taking the harvested produce to nearby wholesale markets. Nobody will buy the potatoes to transport them to the towns and cities with a violent blockade-hartal programme in force. The farmers grudgingly carry small quantities of the perishable vegetable home, and some to the neighbourhood markets. They leave the rest back in the field to rot away.
With the growers of potato and other winter vegetables bearing the brunt of the lengthy and violent agitation programme, the farmers have started bracing for heavy monetary losses. Many have already fallen into the abyss, as the prospects for cultivating these vegetables in the next season look bleak. Labour and large sums of money have gone down the drain, loan sharks bide time to launch a swoop, rosy dreams born of good harvests have simply vanished. A virtual gloom has lately descended on the vegetable growers, a major segment in the country's agriculture. Apart from potatoes, vegetables such as tomatoes, brinjals, cauliflower etc have also entered bad times. In mid-January, the price of different potato varieties dropped to Tk 4.15-Tk 6.0 per kilogramme (kg) on the growers' end. Thanks to the manipulation by middlemen, the vegetable was selling between Tk 18 and Tk 24 per kg in the capital and other big cities. The price hasn't changed much later. The wider picture this year reminds one of that in 2013. That year the country passed through similar political convulsions. Those were accompanied by acts of arson and other forms of vandalism targeting highway transports. Alongside traders and businesses, hundreds of farmers, including vegetable growers, incurred great losses due to the inability to take their goods and produce to the big cities including Dhaka.
People in the urban areas are accustomed to supply-disruptions of agro-products caused by hartals and similar types of programmes. They accept these agitations as part of life in Bangladesh. This stark reality notwithstanding, the massive dislocation in the supply of village-based commodities in two nearly consecutive years is not palatable. As a grim consequence, we may find farmers becoming hesitant or unwilling to cultivate potatoes in the future.
This season, tomato and cauliflower growers have also had to face adversities in many regions of the country. Thanks to a satisfactory harvest of these two vegetables in the Dhaka suburbs and districts close to the city and their abundant supply in the kitchen markets of the capital, their prices have seen a remarkable fall in the past weeks. Winter vegetables flooding Dhaka markets also include cabbage and bottle gourd.
Tomato cultivation has a few unavoidable risks going with it. During its meagre supply in the market in the early days of winter, the price remains exorbitantly high. But almost every year, it takes only three to four weeks for the vegetable to sell at one-fourth of the initial price. Tomato has long lost its monetary appeal to large-scale vegetable growers across the country. One of the causes is its vulnerability to rot if kept in the open. Potato cultivators, those in the greater Munshiganj and Rajshahi in particular, cannot be expected to go for tomato given the feared recurrence of prolonged political turmoil in the future.
There are fears that the current violence-laden blockade-hartal may continue further; it adds to the farmers' hopelessness largely prompted by the fact that potato is also a perishable vegetable. Cold storage charges keep soaring every year. With these despairing prospects in view, potato growers do not find any pragmatic recourse to turn to for solace. Wallowing in their unremitting sorrows in the vicinity of potato gluts, a lot of them might be feeling devastated. Some might blame their own fate, the easiest way to put up with miseries; while many others will muster the courage to say goodbye to vegetable cultivation. And thus we'll chronicle the fizzling-out of a potential sub-sector in our agriculture.
shihabskr@ymail.com