MOHAMMAD AL-MASUM MOLLA and PINAKI ROY

Floods, low rainfall and then fertiliser price hike -- the woes of farmers just won’t stop. And now, they will have to bear the brunt of a sudden 42.5 percent rise in diesel cost, which is likely to make them spend an additional Tk 4,000 in irrigation for per hectare Boro production.

The average cost of Boro production on every hectare was Tk 64,862, excluding that for family labour and land rent, found a study by the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) two years back.

Of the total cost, Tk 14,075 or 21.7 percent goes to irrigation, according to the study, titled “Boro rice procurement in Bangladesh: implications for policy”.

Diesel alone accounts for around 70 percent of the total irrigation cost -- which is Tk 9,852, said its co-author Akhter Ahmed, also country representative of IFPRI.

“We got the data from a household survey. And we found around 92 percent Boro crop is irrigation-fed, except for that in some low-lying haor areas,” Akhter Ahmed told The Daily Star yesterday evening.

Based on the study, The Daily Star calculated that the additional cost for per hectare Boro irrigation would be Tk 4,187 as the government hiked the price of diesel.

Ahmed also supports the estimation but said the cost may vary from region to region.

In 2020, when the study was conducted, per litre diesel price was Tk 74, which has now gone up to Tk 114. And irrigation for Boro production in a hectare land requires over a hundred litres of the fuel.

The country’s farmers are highly dependent on diesel particularly for irrigating and tilling land and threshing their crops. Paddy farming burnt over 15 percent of total 46 lakh tonnes of diesel used in fiscal 2020-21, shows data of Bangladesh Petroleum Corporation.

Last week, the government raised the prices of urea fertiliser by 37.5 percent to Tk 22 per kg in yet another blow to farmers -- many of whom suffered losses and got low crop yields for repeated floods and then extreme heat with scanty rain.

Now the hike in diesel price will have a serious impact on the production of the Boro, a dry season crop that makes up 53 percent of the country’s total rice production. It is planted from December to early February and harvested between April and June.