INADEQUATE attention to agriculture affects a steady growth of the agricultural sector. This is reflected in the declining share of agriculture in gross domestic product in recent years. Its contribution has reduced over a decade, from 17 per cent in 2010 to 12.6 per cent in 2020. Economists at a Bangladesh Institute of Development Studies seminar on May 23 expressed concern about the government鈥檚 policy that sees the sector as a matter of food security, not as a key economic driver, although the sector accounts for a large share of informal labour. While the government insists that it has effected the advancement of agriculture and achieved sufficiency in food production, experts talk about a number of missteps that have negatively influenced agricultural growth. The Delta Plan 2100 and the Eighth Five-Year Plan (2020鈥�2025) focus on accelerating agricultural commercialisation to provide sustainable, safe and diversified food products, but the emphasis on commercial agriculture has turned to technology and agro-chemical industries. The shift towards corporate farming left small farmers in a bind.
Experts consider the impact of climate change, declining farmland, a lack of access to farm loans and inadequate cold storage as main challenges for the agricultural sector. In the past decade, as the Agricultural Census 2019 says, the net cultivable land declined by 2 per cent, or 4.16 lakh acres, to 1.86 crore acres from 1.9 crore acres in 2008. The declining trend is largely due to unplanned industrialisation, a lack of enforcement of land use laws, degradation of land productivity and environmentally-insensitive projects. For small farmers, access to loan services is crucial, particularly when agricultural practices are increasingly mechanised. In 2021, a survey by the Bangladesh Institute of Bank Management reported a declining trend in farm loan disbursement because of the reluctance of private and foreign banks to provide financing for the sector. Moreover, the economic processing zones established to encourage private-sector investments have not only prompted the government to acquire agricultural land for industrial purposes, but they also have also facilitated a process of transforming small farmers into petty commodity producers or industrial labour.
The government must, therefore, revisit its policy for the agricultural sector and address the challenges identified by economists. It must take the issue of rapidly declining agricultural land and the associated risk of food insecurity seriously and ensure a strict enforcement of laws and policies. It must review the banking policy for the agricultural sector with a focus on marginal farmer鈥檚 access to financial and loan facilities. More important, the government must review its development policies that have unthinkingly promoted commercial farming without considering the impact of the model on small farmers.
