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Govt prioritises food output rise to fight calamities

Food minister tells int'l workshop

Staff Correspondent
The government will prioritise introducing new farm technologies to enhance food production and income of the poor in coastal districts to help them fight natural calamities, said Food Minister Dt Abdur Razzaque yesterday.
“Natural disaster is the number one threat to food security." he said while speaking at the inaugural session of an international workshop on 'Tsunami/Storm Surge Hazard Assessment and Management in Bangladesh' at a hotel in the city.
Seeking support of the international community to help the government in undertaking income generation schemes for people, he said, "We focus more on post-disaster management, but we should also concentrate on empowering them so that they can have good houses."
The two-day workshop has
been organised by Comprehensive Disaster Management Programme (CDMP) of the Ministry of Food u n d Disaster Management in collaboration with the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), UK's Department for International Development (DFID) and European Commission (EC).
Experts from different countries are taking part in the workshop.
Speaking as chief guest. Dr Abdur Razzaque said price hike of food commodities following crop losses by cyclone Sidr in 2007 pushed several million people back into poverty and it is a great challenge for the government to improve their livelihoods.
“Ilie farming system in the coastal zones is different. Therefore, we have to introduce new farming technologies for those areas for more crop production," said the
agriculture minister citing a success story of growing crops in a coastal district.
Dr Razzaque said the government is now thinking of sustainable housing patterns and cattle shelters apart from building more shelters for people in disaster-prone areas.
Asked about corruption in disaster management process after the inauguration of the workshop, he told newsmen, "In developing countries corruption takes place, but the government will check any corrupt practices."
Speaking as special guest, Brae University Vice-chancellor Prof Jamilur Reza Chowdhury laid emphasis on developing an early warning system and finding out the sources of Tsunami accurately for better preparedness.
"In case of Tsunami, you get less time for warning," he said, adding that many people in coastal zones did not
respond to cyclone warnings tliinking that those were not true.
People must be made aware of it, he noted.
Emaduddin Aluned, executive director of the Institute of Water Modeling, in a presentation said existing facilities to record data on elements of disasters is very poor, and regular update of the storm surge and Tsunami models is an urgent job.
Food and Disaster Management Secretary Molla Wahceduzzaman chaired the session, while Ian Rector, CDMP chief technical adviser, Stefan Priesner, UNDP country director, Milko Van Gool, head of the Delegation of EC to Bangladesh, Kenji Satake, chair of International Union of Geodesy and Geophysics, and KH Masud Siddiqui, director general of Disaster Management Bureau, also spoke.