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New farm policy aims to break yield ceiling

UNB, Dhaka
Even with a decreasing birth rate, up to two million people add each year to Bangladesh's 16.58 crore population. Because of an already large populace, the country requires an additional five lakh metric tonnes (MT) of food to feed the yearly addition.
With the current farm production hitting a plateau, the government plans to break the yield ceiling by embarking upon a new national agriculture policy, drafted five years after the existing one adopted in 2013.
Agriculture ministry sources told the news agency that the proposed National Agriculture Policy 2018 elaborated ways and means to augment farm production in the country to meet the growing needs of an increasing population.
To elicit views from people of all strata, Bangladesh Agricultural Research Council (BARC), the federating body of all farm research stations in the country, has recently hosted a meeting before finalising the new policy.
The draft policy envisages plans to pursue frontier sciences including agricultural biotechnology, and invest more on research and development (R&D) to break the current yield ceiling and go for achieving higher growth momentum.
According to the proposed policy, moves would be taken to stop conversion of farmlands as the country is losing its fertile crop lands to urbanisation, industrialisation, brick kilns and illegal land grabbers. It
emphasises the use of more surface water to reduce pressures on groundwater for farm irrigation; otherwise ecological balance will be in great danger.
The new policy guideline has got clear mandates for inviting the private sector to invest in research. It expresses firm resolve to tap full potential of Bangladeshi scientists' unlocking genome maps of jute so that better breeds can be developed.
It takes the climate change impacts on farm productivity into serious consideration and stresses development of crop varieties which would be able to withstand stresses like drought, cold, salinity and submergence.
The proposed policy keeps provision of using modern IT technology and other advanced knowledge to pursue precision farming, more mechanisation and elimination of hazardous practices like employing of children in pesticide application.
The move to replace National Agriculture Policy-2013 with the National Agriculture Policy-2018 comes at a time when Bangladesh badly requires further augmentation in farm production to maintain food security.
After six years of sustained balance in rice production and supply, Bangladesh has been badly poised in the current fiscal as far as attaining self-sufficiency in the staple is concerned. Till the first week of this month, government and private traders imported over 32 lakh MT of rice, a record for many years.