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Small farmers going thru hardship: experts
STAR BUSINESS REPORT
Small and marginal farmers are increasingly finding it difficult to sustain their livelihoods based on prevailing crop practices, marketing channels and value chains, said experts yesterday.
These concerns were voiced during an event on citizen’s agenda for inclusive development and fairness organised by the Citizen’s Platform for SDGs, Bangladesh.
Four papers are presented at the event organised at Brac Centre Inn in the capital on four different crucial issues to capture the views of the country’s left-behind stakeholders.
Jinnat Ara, a research fellow at the Bangladesh Institute of Development Studies, presented a paper on transforming agriculture for an inclusive and diversified economy.
She said the government has taken initiatives toward agricultural transformation including installing solar-powered irrigation pumps, establishing agriculture information centres and distributing agriculture assistance cards for subsidies.
“In spite of these initiatives, backward and forward linkages between agriculture and industry have remained weak,” said Ara.
She said the main challenges that agricultural transformation was facing were a labour shortage, land fragmentation, access to resources, climate change and environmental degradation, weak water management, lack of skilled labour, etc.
A lack of appropriate government policy and limited research and development are also key barriers, she said.
Unplanned urbanisation has reduced the quality of life of city dwellers as global indicators rank Bangladeshi cities as the least liveable ones, said Shanawez Hossain, an assistant professor at Independent University, Bangladesh.
He was presenting a paper on providing public utilities and services against the backdrop of unplanned urbanisation.
Despite substantial investments, urban development initiatives face critical setbacks as the standard of living remains dismally low, exacerbated by a lack of coordination among organisations, experts said during a discussion on the topic.
Vulnerable backward communities are at risk, and youths grapple with an acute shortage of skills and decent employment opportunities, they said.
It is often heard that Dhaka is one of the most polluted cities in the world. But the government has spent about Tk 1,35,000 crore for the development of Dhaka in the last decade, said Hossain.
This means that there is a difference between policy implementation and money allocation, he said.
He also said e-waste was growing at the rate of 20 percent every year in the city and a large portion of solid waste was not collected.
According to him, this dire condition of cities was due to a lack of good governance, coordination and information policy.
The city’s service providers should be strengthened. More than 30 organisations are involved in traffic management in Dhaka. But none of the organisations know what the others are doing, he added.
In order to develop urban services, laws should be updated and made people-friendly, people should be given correct information and examples of different countries should be taken into consideration, he recommends.
In most of the cases, the discussion on recent economic advancement in Bangladesh remains limited to “average development”, said Debapriya Bhattacharya, convenor of the citizen’s platform.
“But behind this average there are various types of errors or inequities. People who fall behind or are held back do not develop as much as they should with this average as their vulnerability remains,” he said.
There is another factor in moving from a lower-middle-income country to an upper-middle-income country, which is the middle-income trap, said Bhattacharya, a distinguished fellow of the Centre for Policy Dialogue.
To save Bangladesh from this middle-income trap, production-based diversification should be brought into the economy, he said.
He also said Bangladesh was now in the process of a democratic transition. He hoped that there would be a fair, competitive, participatory and transparent election in Bangladesh.