No land use policy yet!

We have a genius for ignoring the fundamentals and basics of having a policy tool firmly in hand duly bearing the stamp of political commitment from both sides of the aisle for an effective use of our scarce natural endowment. Consumed by the fires of political confrontation and partisan patronisation, loss of government land to private and official grabbers, misgovernance all around, successive governments lost any rational sense of prioritisation. Which is why we are in such dire straits with our land now.

We have it on the authority of the minister for agriculture MK Anwar that at the current rate of decrease of farmland (one percent a year), theoretically speaking, there will be no cultivable land left in Bangladesh in 50 years' time.

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Urbanisation, habitation, industrialisation and parcelling out of land through fragmentation of inheritance topped off by the compulsion to feed two million more mouths every year are rendering land scarcer and its management more daunting by the day.

The diminishing size of the traditionally cultivable land is an irreversible reality. Taking this as the basic premise we have attempted to draw up a blueprint based on the recommendations of the Bangladesh Rice Foundation (BRF) and our own findings over time.

The first element in the stratagem will have to be an expeditious recovery of all khas lands expropriated by various quarters from time to time. Going by the enormity of land in wrong hands, there is a huge potential for replenishment. Second, non-farm and less productive land will have to be earmarked in each mouza and village for essential development projects so that they do not eat up cultivable spaces. Then reclamation of land from flood-prone, drought-vulnerable and salinity-stricken areas needs to be undertaken in a massive scale.

As an integral part of the land use strategy we also must have a policy for an extensive wetland and haor management endeavour. Nothing like involving the locals in the conservation of wetlands. As a matter of fact, in the whole range of land use activity being visualised, people's participation will be crucial.

One very important complement of the land use policy ought to be agricultural research geared to raise productivity. But government expenditure on farm research has steadily declined from 0.3 percent of agriculture's contribution to GDP in 1999-2000 to 0.2 percent in 2002-03. In our context, research allocation has to be 2 percent of the farm sector's contribution to GDP. Are we alive to the research deficit?