Editorial
Boro procurement drive
Incentive price for farmers key to success
Congratulations to our farmers and agricultural extension workers on their making a roaring success of the boro season yielding a bumper crop. When declining rice production and consequent high prices of cereals are worldwide phenomena, Bangladesh stands out with her proven promise of being a rice surplus country.
With the boro harvest estimated to be around 20million tonnes, the government's procurement target of 1.5million tonnes seems quite reachable -- on the face of it. There are two reality checks we must go through before getting our hopes too high: first, just as higher boro production has induced the government to try and procure more, so also has it stimulated the appetite of open market operators to haul up as much cereals as possible into their godowns. Practically, the government and the private sector buyers are competing with each other. Secondly, through the failure of their successive procurement drives, the government has learnt the hard way that it is not simply a matter of announcing a price and waiting for the growers to respond voluntarily. The initiative must lie with the government.
Let's not forget that besides the government there are other major players in the market, and not all with the best of intentions in their mind. With surplus you have the smugglers trying to siphon off some of it while the fariah or middleman stand between the government purchasing centre and the growers and buying up the commodity afield. The rural financiers who had advanced money to small farmers and sharecroppers would shovel out the crop from the field.
It is a common experience in the rural setting that the fariahs pay the price at the government rate at the doorsteps of the growers who are only keen to sell their produce without having to bear the cost of journey to the government's purchasing centre. So, the government purchasing agents will have to reach the growers at their doorsteps before the middlemen do.
The objectives of the procurement drive are two-fold. One is, of course, building a stockpile of rice; and two, making sure that in doing so, the farmers have been given remunerative price for their produce. If we fail to reward our farmers for their good work they will hold it against the government in the next season by moving away from cultivating boro. That will be dealing a blow to our drive for food self-sufficiency.
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