Editorial
Food issues
A product of uninformed decision-making
The government has tried a raft of measures, literally exhausting all conceivable options to bring down the price of rice that spiralled out of affordability of com-mon man. Even the open market sale (OMS) by the government has not reduced the price line significantly. Now the joint forces are planning for a market monitoring exercise from tomorrow that would include scrutinising the purchase and sale receipts at the wholesalers' and retailers' levels.
Against this backdrop, the commerce ministry under the stewardship of the new adviser on Wednesday held a meeting with top-ranking economists, governor, Bangladesh Bank and heads of some government agencies to identify the flaws in the marketing system and devise ways to address them.
They came up with three recommendations: building a system of information and market forecasting, letting the market forces operate naturally and target-oriented programmes for the ultra-poor based on free feeding for a time as well as food for work.
It is the first recommendation that we would like to focus our editorial on for the simple reason that it's the least addressed agenda but the most imperative one. We have to remove the information gaps about production, demand, supply, calamity-induced deficit, requirement of import and international prices. For instance, we have tossed around differing statistics of production, losses through floods and cyclones, domestic procurement and import requirements betraying an impression of absolutely groping in the dark. The figures of availability announced did not match with those on the ground. The dubious quality rice and wheat imported during the fag-end of the last BNP government had to be written off. With such inaccurate data-base, collation of statistics and lack of analysis we failed to formulate a strategy of preparedness against contin-gencies.
It is learnt from food and agriculture ministry sources that in 2006-07 fiscal, the net production of food was 2,52,44,000 metric tonnes and the requirement was 2,51,61,000 metric tonnes, but in the same year, despite the surplus, 24,20,000 metric tonnes was imported. The same is the picture for the year before! Why? There is no plausible explanation.
Little wonder, we have been dogged by stark market forecasting inadequacies. That the availability of rice was badly circumscribed by poor output in rice exporting countries was a known fact. Could we not make timely imports to cushion ourselves against any exigency. In the last one year the price of rice and wheat has increased two-fold. Look at China, India and Brazil, as pointed out by economist Dr Wahiduddin Mahmud, who were prescient of the trends and direction of the international market to build up buffer stocks to weather the storm. That's the market monitoring, we need.
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