Our Ill-paid Farmers and Future of Our Foodstuff

A few days back while coming back from Jessore, I came across a middle-aged tea seller at Daulatdia Ferry Terminal. From my idiosyncratic curiosity to learn about good and bad of people of various professions, I asked over his income and expenditure. Entirely with an aggrieved tone, the skinny man unveiled the appalling gap between his earnings and expenses. “I am not actually a tea seller. I am a farmer. But what could we do, if we don’t get the fair price of our crops? We are not being able to balance between our production cost and returns!”- a middle-aged Monir Sarkar articulated almost with a single breath. He also regretted farmers’ having no strong organization that can submit demands on behalf of the farming community. This is not actually a fragmented picture. The frustration of Monir Sarkar, the farmer cum tea vendor, undeniably reflects the frustration of the whole farming community of our country.

When the world community is chanting the slogan “ensure food security, reduce the number of hungry people,” we are ironically leading our people to uncertainty, especially by neglecting those who are directly involved in producing life-saving foodstuff. “Some 795 million people in the world do not have enough food to lead a healthy active life. That's about one in nine people on earth and 98 percent of them live in developing countries.” (Source: State of Food Insecurity in the World, FAO, 2015). There are more hungry people in the world than the combined populations of USA, Canada and the European Union. 578 million live in Asia and the Pacific, 239 million in Sub-Saharan Africa, 53 million in Latin America and the Caribbean, 37 million in the Near East and North Africa, 19 million in developed countries. According to WFP, Bangladesh has about 60 million people in urban and rural areas that are food insecure and not consuming the minimum daily food intake required for a healthy life.
In the prehistoric period when the world was practically borderless, people used to move along and throng around the regions where food was available. Being close to the sea and being the Gangetic basin, most parts of the Indian subcontinent, including Bengal were fertile and, therefore, a storehouse of food grains. As such, people from various parts of the world came over here in search of food. Their gradual settlement contributed greatly to the diversity and density of population in the region.
As regards Bangladesh, the country has proved the population theory of Thomas Robert Malthus wrong, especially by applying comprehensive agricultural technology in the country. With doubling the population of the country, food production has increased four times here in the last four decades. We have been recognized self-dependent in terms of food production and consumption. And, we have started exporting food grains, particularly rice, though in small scale. But ironically, we could not balance between the price and cost of food production here in our own land. Moreover, unauthorized import of foodstuff, especially rice, from the neighbouring countries complicates the fall of price in the local market, conspicuously hampering our farming community.
No nation in the world has developed itself without making the proper use of the resources available in that country. Import oriented economy does not sustain for long. From time immemorial, the economy of Bangladesh is agro-based. While, even in an age of advanced technology, nearly 80% of our population directly or indirectly depends on agriculture, we cannot think of comprehensive development without focusing on this large sector. If we explore the history of the progress of human civilization, we notice at least three transformative stages viz. agro-economy, industrial economy and techno-economy. Most of the present world developed countries have gone through these three plodding stages in their vista of progress. For Bangladesh, the economic transformation is quite surprising as the country almost jumps the phase in between, namely industrial economy, renovating its economy directly from agro-based to techno-oriented. This has been possible because now we need not invent technologies ourselves; rather we can simply import those from the farthest corners of the world.
But time has not come yet for us to become complacent. We can, by no way, deny the huge load of our population. We cannot continue becoming an import oriented country. Our reserve may fall inadequate, our flow of remittance may slow, and crisis may develop in the world market. Actually, a number of other unpredictable factors may contribute to the disruption of the current course of our economy. Additionally, we must feed our 161 million people, and we cannot but augment the current level of food production. As such, we cannot neglect our farming community.
All of us vividly know that Bangladesh is a disaster-prone country. As regards food security, particularly we cannot forget the famines of 1770, 1943 and 1974 that ravaged our land and brought untold miseries to millions of people and resulted in deaths of many. Those occurrences left deep scars in our collective psyche and established the notion of “poor Bangladesh ravaged by natural calamities” in the mind of international communities.
The silver lining is that the government has been taking adequate steps, denying prescription of some ill-motivating international organizations, to develop our agriculture sector. Four agricultural universities, at least two of them have already achieved international acclamation; have been set up to carry out massive research on agricultural development. The universities have already shown praiseworthy success in the fields of research and innovation. An agro-based Export Processing Zone at Uttara, Nilphamari has been set up. Farmers are being given subsidies to buy agricultural materials. Besides, sponsoring agricultural production, the government must ensure apposite price of rice and other agricultural goods so that our farming community feels secure to continue with their profession. Let our farmers live secure, let’s live ourselves safe.