Streamlining foodgrain procurement

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FOLLOWING every major harvest of foodgrains, the government launches a programme to buy up the marketable surplus from the farmers. The intention, at least on paper, is to reward and provide incentive to the farmers adequately for their produce to keep the them interested to produce in the next season. The declared objective is to encourage overall production of farm produces on the high side. This is also the government policy this year for the boro harvest.

But the reality in most cases is that it is difficult to ensure that the farmers get the benefits of the official price. The official procurement centres exist all right. But when approached by the small and marginal farmers, the operators of these centres on this or that plea refuse to deal with them. The small and marginal farmers cannot hold on to their stocks for long as they need cash badly to meet their urgent needs.

They also have to repay the debts they had to incur to raise the crops. Thus, they are forced to sell their produce to private middlemen at lower prices. The middlemen then take their stocks to sell at the government declared prices at the procurement centres. The benefits of the better prices thus go to the middlemen and not to the farmers.

The operators of the procurement centres were earlier found having a hand in glove relationship with the middlemen and the real lubricant of this relationship was bribe given by the middlemen to these operators. It has made the institutional arrangement ineffective as the declared object remains unattained. All concerned would expect things to improve here during the tenure of this caretaker government.

The corruption at the procurement centres must be eliminated for good for the institutional arrangement to work. Farmers need to get the due price support not in words but in deeds. It is vitally important to improve the income of most of them, who suffer in extreme poverty. Large scale poverty reduction in the countryside -- where over seventy five per cent of the people of the country live -- is linked considerably to successful operation of policies designed to provide the farmers to get good prices for their produce.

Ariful Karim

Banani,

Dhaka.