Experts question WB project in farm sector : Suggest need assessment before seeking foreign loans

Mustafizur Rahman

After two major ‘reform’ initiatives that proved disastrous for the country’s jute sector, the World Bank has come up with another project in Bangladesh’s agriculture raising doubts among experts about its real intention.
   The $84.6 million National Agriculture Technology Project conceived in February 2008, apparently aims at improving national agricultural productivity and farm income to reduce extreme poverty and hunger.
   The project has four components – agricultural research support, agricultural extension support, development of supply chains and institutional efficiency.
   Experts in agriculture suggest that the government should assess the real needs before seeking funds from global lenders for the sector, which is doing well even without any foreign assistance and limited support from the public coffers.
   Involvement of the World Bank in the vital sector has also raised doubts in many because of the lending agency’s past policies that led to the death of jute sector, once the biggest export earner of the country.
   ‘The country’s agriculture sector has been making significant progress since early 1980s…We must work out our requirements in the area before taking assistance from the World Bank or any other international agency,’ former agriculture minister MK Anwar told New Age Saturday.
   The government is negotiating implementation of the Tk 622 crore project initially taken up by Fakhruddin Ahmed’s interim government in June 2007 with WB fund. Work on the project, scheduled for completion in 2013, started in September 2008 with a contribution of Tk 48 crore from the government.
   This is a major WB project in Bangladesh’s agriculture after the Jute Sector Reform Programme and Jute Sector Adjustment Credit implemented in early 1990s that reduced the once vibrant jute industry to a footnote in history.
   Bangladesh received less than $300 million in loan from the WB for the two projects at the cost of its overseas jute market and closure of 60 out of 82 state-owned jute mills that employed several million workers and provided a living for 25 million people engaged in jute farming and trading.
   As a sequel to the credit programmes, wheels of Adamjee, the world’s largest jute mills, ground to a halt in July 2002 taking the blame for losses resulted from neglect, corruption and mismanagement of decades.
   ‘In fact there is no need for such loans. Tk 622 crore is not a large sum…,’ says Professor Anu Muhammad, who teaches economics at Jahangirnagar University.
   Agriculture now is a global business and that is why the World Bank is offering money to countries like Bangladesh with a view to further commercialising the farm sector and intervening more in policies, which will ultimately put the country’s food security in jeopardy, he warned.
   He cited WB-influenced policies in the past that weakened the Bangladesh Agriculture Development Corporation and extension services.
   ‘Only beneficiaries, who include consultants, will welcome such WB funds,’ said Professor Anu.
   He suggested that the government should assess the impacts of previous WB-aided ‘reform’ projects and work out a futuristic plan for agricultural development to ensure food security.
   This time the World Bank wanted non-government organisations as partners in implementing the NATP.
   ‘Why should we invite the NGOs for implementation of the agriculture sector project? We will take assistance only where we need it. We must assess our needs first and that must be done by ourselves,’ MK Anwar, a senior leader of the opposition BNP, said.
   The government, however, has turned down the lender’s proposal for engaging NGOs in implementing the NATP.
   ‘We have rejected outright the World Bank’s proposal for including NGOs in the Common Interest Groups to be formed at the grassroots under the first ever project in agriculture sector with World Bank assistance,’ agriculture minister Matia Chowdhury said Tuesday after a meeting with the lender’s representatives.
   She said the WB officials were convinced that the CIGs should be formed with the farmers at the village level without any involvement of the NGOs.
   Talking with New Age on the issue, former adviser to the interim government CS Karim said the country should go for need-based research in the agriculture sector.
   ‘We need to develop new varieties of paddy for southern parts of the country already affected by salinity. Moreover, the agriculture sector must be developed keeping in view the effects of climate change,’ Karim, also a nuclear scientist, pointed out.
   Echoing Anwar, the agriculture adviser to the 2007-08 interim government said the government must negotiate with international organisations on the basis of its own need assessment to develop the agriculture sector.
   The NATP, which looks to increase efficiency and effectiveness of agricultural research and extension systems, was framed during Karim’s tenure as the adviser.
   At the meeting with agriculture minister Matia Chowdhury last week, the WB stressed the need for expediting amendments to the Bangladesh Agricultural Research Council Act 1996.
   ‘The delay in making amendments to the BARC Act is affecting the implementation of the Sponsored Public Good Research Component of the project which accounts for 20 per cent of base costs,’ said an official quoting the WB presentation made at the meeting.
   MK Anwar opposed the amendments to the Bangladesh Agricultural Research Council. ‘World Bank does not want BARC to coordinate all development and research activities in agriculture sector.’
   Former finance adviser to the caretaker government Akbar Ali Khan said the government should undertake innovative projects in the agriculture sector, but everything should not be done in accordance with the suggestions of the donor agencies.
   ‘All projects in the agriculture sector are old…We should initiate new projects where we can take support from international organisations, like World Bank. But we should not follow all suggestions of the lending agencies,’ Akbar said.
   The project coordination unit is yet to develop a comprehensive strategy and action plan for the formation and mobilisation of about 15,000 CIGs as planned to deliver project support and benefit farmers in the targeted upazilas. Initially, the agriculture ministry has selected 120 upazilas for the NATP interventions, according to official records.
   World Bank’s past role in Bangladesh agriculture asking the governments to close down Bangladesh Agricultural Development Corporation and not to give subsidies to farmers made economists sceptic about its real agenda behind the new project.
   Despite its declining share in GDP, agriculture still accounts for about 21 per cent of gross domestic product, employs around 50 per cent of the total labour force and feeds around 140 million people of the country.

Source: The Daily New Age, 13 October 2009

Unplanned housing, infrastructure cuts down cropland

Khawaza Main Uddin

The dwindling size of farms, rise in landlessness and constant depletion of farmland are posing formidable threats to Bangladesh’s agriculture, increasing poverty and trapping many ultra-poor people in a vicious circle, according to various reports.
   The average farm size has been reduced to less than 0.6 hectares and the percentage of landless people stands at 58 in a country where nearly 80 per cent of the ultra-poor live in rural areas.
   Official statistics also show that the country is losing more than one per cent or 80,000 hectares each year from its original 13 million hectares of cropland due to urbanisation, industrialisation, unplanned rural housing and infrastructure building.
   Agriculture accounts for only 21 per cent of the country’s gross domestic product although the sector employs around 50 per cent of the national workforce, according to the Bangladesh Economic Review 2008.
   However, the country’s problem of landlessness has emerged as an international issue with the non-functioning of a rule-based global trading regime which has deprived Bangladesh of required supports to overcome the nagging domestic problems of food and agriculture.
   The director-general of the World Trade Organisation, Pascal Lamy, recently referred to this critical issue at an international forum, pointing out that in the world’s poorest corners, including Bangladesh, land is getting divided through inheritance and farm sizes are getting smaller and smaller with the passing of every generation.
   A Washington-based International Food Policy Research Institute, in its recent report titled ‘New Findings on the World’s Most Deprived: Characteristics and Causes of Extreme Poverty and Hunger’, mentioned that the incidence of landlessness was 58 per cent.
   Also, the number of farms in Bangladesh has doubled over the past 20 years, increasing the number of farms smaller than 0.2 hectares in size proportionately, said the World Bank in its ‘World Development Report 2008: Agriculture for Development’. ‘This is a major cause of rural poverty, said the WB.
   Pascal Lamy expressed his conviction that even the most sophisticated international trade policies would not provide incentives to agriculture in poor countries unless problems like environmental challenges and dwindling farm size were addressed by supportive domestic policies.
   ‘In Bangladesh the situation is worse,’ Lamy observed in a speech to the International Food and Agricultural Trade Policy Council in Salzburg, Austria, on May 10.
   The average size of farms diminished from 1.4 hectares to 0.6 hectares between 1960 and 2000. The increase in the number of farms has triggered a rise in landlessness, he said.
   The only crop whose area of cultivation is increasing over the past decades is rice. According to the Bangladesh Annual Economic Review 2008, the size of the area in which pulses were cultivated shrank further to 7.69 lakh acres with output declining to 2.58 lakh tonnes in 2006-07 from 17.15 lakh acres with production of 5.28 lakh tonnes in 1996-97. The country’s oil seed production was 3.22 lakh tonnes from 7.84 lakh acres in the 2005-06 fiscal year compared to 4.78 lakh tonnes on 13.7 lakh acres in the 1996-97 fiscal year. Production of wheat also dropped from 14.54 lakh tonnes on 17.49 acres of land in 1996-97 to 7.37 lakh tonnes on 9.88 lakh acres in the 2006-07 fiscal year.
   An earlier global report, titled ‘Climate Change as a Security Risk’, said that the probable loss of arable and residential lands through flooding in this part of the world [Bangladesh and its neighbourhood] would result in increase of internal and external environmental migration and strained relations between countries.
   ‘No matter how sophisticated our trade policies may be, if domestic policies do not themselves incentivize (sic) agriculture, and internalize negative social and environmental externalities, then we will always have a problem,’ said Lamy.
   Uttam Kumar Deb of the Centre for Policy Dialogue recommended that a solution to the issue of farmland depletion could be formulation of a sensible and realistic land-use policy. ‘We have to find out why people are becoming landless and how to solve the problem of shrinkage of arable land. Only then can necessary measures be taken,’ he told New Age.
   Lamy sounded a positive note by claiming that Bangladeshis, on an average, spent 60 per cent of their income on food in 1990 and that sum is said to have come down to 50 per cent now. However, he regretted that ‘the world does not have a shared vision of what global integration should look like and what it can deliver in agriculture’.
   ‘Global integration must also allow food, [animal] feed and fibre to travel from countries where they are efficiently produced to countries where there is demand,’ he argued.
   Saying that some of the world’s poorest countries have taxed agriculture the most, and that reinvestment of tax revenue in agriculture has been low, Lamy stressed the need for focussing first on national agriculture and food policy.
   According to him, land management, natural resources management, water availability, property rights, enforcement, storage, transportation and distribution infrastructure, credit systems, and science and technology are all key elements of the solution of the agriculture and food security puzzle.

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Ban on raising any structure on agri land recommended
United News of Bangladesh . Dhaka

 

The parliamentary standing committee on planning ministry in a meeting Tuesday recommended a ban on raising any structure
   on agricultural land, as farmlands are getting scarce in the country.
   The lawmakers also recommended inclusion of educated people in school managing committees for improvement of the degrading standard of education.
   Recruitment of teachers at educational institutions proportionate to the numbers of students and undertaking plan for construction of multi-storied pucca bhaban for government and non-government primary schools were also suggested.
   The meeting suggested fair distribution of sports materials on the basis of population as per the parliamentary constituencies, and adopted a resolution for involvement of local lawmakers for ensuring more ‘transparency and accountability’ in the distribution.
   It was informed that construction works on the Language Institute would be completed by August and the proposal for giving VIP status to gallantry-award-holding freedom fighters would get approval ‘soon’.
   Held in the cabinet room of Jatiya Sangsad Bhaban, the meeting reviewed the progress of different projects taken up by education, youth and sports, and cultural affairs ministries.
   Committee chairman Oli Ahmed presided over the meeting, which was attended by committee-members planning minister Abdul Karim Khandaker, Mohiuddin Khan Alamgir, Mohammad Nazrul Islam, Azizul Haque Chowdhury, Nawab Ali Abbas Khan and ANM Shamsul Islam.
   At the start, the meeting expressed deep shock at the death of prime minister’s husband, MA Wazed Miah, and prayed for the departed soul.

Source: The Daily New Age, 20 May 2009 

Killer pesticides: Mindless use in Dhamrai farmlands causes death of 3 kids in a month; many others ill

Pinaki Roy

Excessive use of pesticides on farmlands of Malancha and Naogakaith in Dhamrai upazila has led to death of at least three children and a number of calves, dogs and fowls last month.

For same reasons, some 13 other children, all aged below seven, were hospitalised, while some farmers too fell sick during the period.

A committee formed by the Institute of Epidemiology, Disease Control and Research (IEDCR) reveals this in its primary investigation report.

Talking about reasons behind the deaths in Dhamrai, IEDCR Director Dr Mahmudur Rahman told The Daily Star, “We are sure it was pesticide poisoning. And we are afraid it’s happening in other parts of the country as well.”

During a visit to the villages yesterday, this correspondent found the families did not yet know that excessive use of pesticides had caused the death of their kids.

Abdus Samad, grandfather of Meem, a 32-month-old girl who died on April 2, told The Daily Star, “I had breakfast with her in the morning. We talked a lot and she did not show any symptoms of sickness. After some time, she went out and came back ill.”

Asked what she thought was the cause of her daughter’s death, Meem’s mother Asma Begum said, “The doctors could not diagnose the disease.”

During investigation, the IEDCR committee gathered that the farmers in those villages used Furadan or Carbofuran (recently banned in Kenya as it was found killing lions there) on paddy fields.

Besides, some villagers were using organophosphate insecticides like Cypermethrin, Malathion and Chlorpyrifos many times the recommended dose.

Local Agricultural Officer Khairul Alam gave some examples of pesticides being sprayed way more than what is recommended.

Halim, an aubergine farmer in Malancha village, has applied eight to 10 kilograms of Furadan and 63 bottles (120 ml each) of liquid pesticides on his .75-acre land.

“Using that much pesticide is highly dangerous. We don’t even recommend strong pesticides like Furadan for eggplants. He should have used only 600 ml of liquid pesticide and that too in three phases,” said Khairul Alam.

The primary investigation found quite a few examples of excessive use of pesticides.

For instance, Khaleque treats his chilli on a small piece of land with 500 grams of Furadan. Barek applies three kilograms of Furadan for his 2.57-acre paddy, while Shukur treats the edge of his field with rat poison.

Nizam of Malancha village sprayed his mango trees with Chlorpyrifos in the early morning of April 2. His daughter Meem picked a mango from one of the trees at around 7:30am and died within an hour, the IEDCR report states.

Locals said most of the children who were hospitalised and farmers who fell sick became sick in between April 2 and April 14. Each of them commonly showed a sudden onset of symptoms–reduced consciousness, frothy discharge, respiratory distress, constricted pupils and convulsions.

Before expiry, the dogs and calves were bellowing, jerking heads and off feeding, the IEDCR report said.

“Initially, it was hard for us to understand the disease. But as symptoms emerged, we treated the patients for poisoning,” said Dr Nitya Gopal Chowdhury, medical officer (disease control) of Dhamrai upazila health complex.

Asked why the children are more prone to pesticide poisoning, he said, “It’s their weaker resistance to pesticides.”

He said none of the affected children’s breath reeked of pesticide or any chemical, which suggests they did not swallow pesticide.

Meanwhile, IEDCR has launched an awareness campaign against pesticides in those two villages.

It suggests that the villagers not allow their children to go to the paddy and vegetable fields and not use the clay to make toys or oven.

The IEDCR team has collected biological and environmental samples including blood, urine, stool, cough, and breast milk from around 100 villagers.

The samples have been sent abroad for further tests.

Source: The Daily Star, 05 May 2009

No professional recognition of farm labourers

Khadimul Islam

People employed as labourers in the agriculture sector are yet to be recognised as labourers as they have no minimum wages and face seasonal joblessness, though they depend on their daily labour for a living.
   Talking to New Age, some agricultural labourers in three divisions said that they had no idea about ‘May Day’, minimum wage and their rights as labourers. They only sought works for a living throughout the year.
   ‘38 years have passed after the independence of the country, which is one of the signatories of the ILO convention. But the successive governments did not formulate any agricultural labour law to recognise farm labourers as workers and ensure their welfare,’ Saiful Huq, general secretary of Bangladesh Khetmojur Union faction, told New Age.
   Samsuzzaman Selim, president of the farm labourers’ wing of Bangladesh Khetmajur Samiti, said there were about 6 crore farm labourers in the country and they remained jobless for about 150 days a year.
   The farm labourers and marginal farmers face acute food shortage during the lean period of the year — from early October to mid-November — when there is little or no job in the cropland after sowing aman paddy. The period lingers as conventional aman crop takes 145-148 days to become ripe.
   ‘What we have earned during the cultivation and harvesting of the crop is not sufficient to meet our needs during the lean period as the quantity of paddy or its cash equivalent in exchange for labour is very nominal,’ Ekramul Huq, a farm labourer of Nachole upazila in Chapainawabganj district, told New Age on Wednesday.
   He said this time the landowners had preferred to give paddy instead of cash in exchange for labour to harvest Boro because of lower price of paddy.
   ‘I reached an agreement to harvest each bigha of paddy, which required at least six labourers, for Tk 800,’ said another farm labourer of the upazila.
   ‘This time we are getting 8 kg of paddy for harvesting boro,’ said a farmer of Lalmonirhat.
   The wages of the farm labourers vary. The lowest wages were reported from the northern region of the country. At this moment there is no minimum wage for farm labourers. The wage depends on the whim of the landowners and farmers.
   In 1984, the Agricultural Labour Ordinance set the minimum daily wage for agricultural labour at 3.28 kg of rice or its cash equivalent. But it was not implemented.
   ‘The farm labourers have a master-servant relationship with their employers,’ said an agriculture officer in Rangpur.
   There is gender discrimination in the farm labour. ‘I was hired for Tk 120 while my male counterpart was hired for Tk 250 for the same task of harvesting,’ Nurunnahar, a woman farm labourer of Asulia, told New Age.
   The labour and employment minister, Khandaker Mosharraf Hossain last month at a discussion said the government would take steps to formulate the agricultural labour law to give proper recognition to farmers and ensure their welfare.
   ‘Eighty percent labourers, including farmers, do not come within the purview of the definition of ‘labourer’ as their jobs fall under a sector defined as ‘informal’. This system needs to be changed as informal sector is the main sector of Bangladesh,’ the minister said.

Source: The Daily New Age. 01 May 2009

G8 Agriculture Ministers’ Meeting : 18 to 20 April 2009

Italy: The Province of Treviso will be hosting the first G8 Agriculture Summit from 18 to 20 April 2009

In addition to the eight major countries’ ministers, the Czech Republic’s agriculture minister, in the capacity of EU Council duty president, EU Agriculture Commissioner Marianne Fischer Boel and the Brazilian, Chinese, Indian, Mexican, South African, Egyptian, Australian, Argentinian agriculture ministers will also be attending. Invitations have been extended as well to the FAO, WFP (World Food Programme), IFAD (International Fund for Agricultural Development), World Bank, High-Level Task Force on Food Security, African Union and OECD leaderships. 

A final statement on world food safety was approved at the 2008 G8 Summit in Japan. The G8 leaders acknowledged the grave problem caused by rising agricultural commodity prices and called on the agriculture ministers to draw up concrete proposals on world food security.

The G8 Agriculture Ministers’ Meeting aims to identify a joint strategy for containing spiralling prices and limiting the impact of future world food crises.

Conditions on the world agricultural commodity markets have changed considerably since the summer of 2008: the international recession and lower oil prices have halted the increase in agricultural commodities. Nevertheless, the international community, the United Nations agencies and the main research and statistics centres estimate that the launch of a fresh cycle of economic recovery may trigger a further rise in food commodity prices, creating serious problems in medium- to low-income countries, and dangerous inflationary trends in the more developed countries as well.

A working paper that will set out the drives on which the various governments will have to embark, in close liaison with the United Nations agencies concerned and the World Bank, is almost completely drawn up with a view to restoring farm produce to the centre of economic policy strategies, countering speculative phenomena, enhancing the production chains and boosting investment in the low-income areas.

The Italian G8 Presidency also intends to back the formation of a Global Partnership for Agriculture and Food Security, which is a scheme to coordinate the organisations and players working to fight hunger and poverty, as Foreign Affairs Under Secretary Vincenzo Scotti also emphasised at the High-Level Meeting on Food Security held in Madrid on 26 and 27 January this year.

Agenda
The meeting is due to commence with a preliminary meeting of the G8 countries’ agriculture ministers on Saturday 18 April 2009.  A working meeting of the G8 ministers and visits to the Treviso area will be held on the morning of Sunday 19 April 2009, followed by an informal working session devoted to the international organizations in the afternoon.
On the morning of Monday 20 April 2008, a working session will be held at Castelbrando comprising ministers from the G8 and G5 groups together with Argentina, Australia and Egypt.  The session will also be attended by representatives of the EU Commission, the EU duty presidency, the World Bank, the FAO, the IFAD, the OECD, the World Food Programme, the UN High Level Task Force and the African Union.  This will be followed by a final joint news conference.
Source:http://www.g8italia2009.it/G8/Home/VersoIlVerticeG8/IncontriMinisteriali/G8-G8_Layout_locale-1199882116809_MinisterialeAgricoltura.htm

Agriculture needs massive investments to face odds : Suggests FAO country chief

Khawaza Main Uddin

Bangladesh needs massive investments in agriculture and agro-processing to attain their higher growth, create employment opportunities and deny possible impacts of the current global recession on this key sector, says the country chief of the Food and Agriculture Organisation.
Ad Spijkers further suggests arrangement for bringing consumer groups at the doorsteps of the farmers to ensure fair prices of the agricultural produces as incentive for gaining higher farm production and productivity.
As the still unfolding financial crisis worldwide is set to have negative impacts on Bangladesh’s different sectors including remittances and agriculture, he feels that the country must be adequately prepared with long-term vision to make sure that ‘agriculture is the backbone of the economy.’
Currently, there are apprehensions that possible decline in remittances earning and exports of jute, jute goods, frozen foods and leather products may deal severe blows — both in terms of prices of products and investments required for farming — to the country’s agriculture, which accounts for approximately 20 per cent of gross domestic product but employs more than 60 per cent of the national workforce.
‘Investment and technologies in agriculture is the most important issue to face the future challenges for sustainable agriculture system,’ Spijkers told New Age in an exclusive interview.
‘Investment in agriculture is essential for intensification, diversification, sustainability and resilience of the food production system as well as to maximise the role that agriculture can play in promoting economic growth and food security.’
 The Bangladesh chapter of the UN body, which is mainly a technical, specialised agency, is supporting the Bangladesh government, seeking external funds for agriculture, to mobilise development partners, including multilateral financial institutions, to funnel resources to the farm sector, the FAO official said. He referred to his recent talks with the World Bank and Danish, US and British donor and lending agencies in this regard.
The FAO, having the mandate of giving technical assistance in broader agriculture including livestock, fisheries and forestry, provides assistance for several programmes on food policy, food safety and natural resources management and is directly involved in helping 1.5 million farmers after the twin floods and cyclone Sidr in 2007.
Dwelling on the dilemma between providing fair crop prices to farmers and keeping food prices lower for the vulnerable groups, Spijkers, who earlier served the FAO in East Asia (Vietnam, China and Cambodia) before the Bangladesh mission in late 2006, expressed his views that input pricing should be efficient and cost-effective while there should be good incentive through fair out prices.
‘You have to keep the farmers smiling. Last harvesting season, they got incentive for Tk 28 per kilogram rice price,’ he said also suggesting that Bangladesh could replicate a Netherlands model to link consumers’ groups to the market close to the farm gates to address the huge trade gap between farmers’ level prices and the ones in any kitchen market in the metropolis.
In this context, the FAO representative favoured pilot project on making crop insurance work because, he pointed out, crop insurance schemes were difficult to design and deliver, especially in fragmented agricultures. He still maintained, ‘Farmers should be kept insured in any way in terms of their production and marketing.’
He also emphasised the need for promoting strong farmers’ organisations, such as Farmers’ Field School, that had already worked successfully in many countries and in Bangladesh as well. ‘Collective organisation of the farmers is crucial not only for fair pricing but also to protect various interests of farmers in terms of information, technologies, inputs and marketing.’
The FAO believes Bangladesh has immense scope to attain self-sufficiency in foods and also significantly increase crop production particularly, wheat, maize, potato, pulses, oil seeds and vegetables. Spijkers is for renewed emphasis of high value added products such as vegetables, fruits, pulses, spices, fishery, poultry and livestock.
He recommended resource endowment in research and extension, education to farmers, diversifying crops, introduction of different crops in changing climatic conditions, cost-effective irrigation and efficient management of water for farming, use of fallow land, and balanced use of fertilisers to improve soil fertility to achieve the goal of exploiting maximum potentials of agriculture.
The country is also said to have a huge prospective of improving the agro-based industries and of creating employment opportunities and avenues of exports. ‘The future thrust of the agro-based industries depends mostly on advance research and marketing,’ noted the FAO official.
His suggestions for the government include allocation of more resources, especially increasing revenue budget to invest in the farm sector, apart from encouraging private sector investments in agriculture with proper support and regulation.
Spijkers maintained that urgent attention should be given to safety nets for the bigger segment of the (rural) poor who are ‘food insecure and do not have the purchasing power to buy adequately the food it needs.’

Source: The Daily New Age, 30 March 2009

COMMODITY SUPPLY MESS:Supermarket pioneer reveals findings :::: The Daily New Age

Kazi Azizul Islam

 

If middlemen are eliminated and agro-produces from growers reach directly to retailers, prices will remain low — it is not only a public perception, also many economists subscribe to this idea.
   But, from his experience of running the operations of the country’s premier superstore chain Agora for the past eight years, Niaz Rahim does not agree to that. ‘Supply chain here is not so simple,’ he says.
   In an exclusive interview the managing director of the Tk 1,400-crore Rahimafrooz Group described to New Age how farmers and small traders occasionally even abandon truckloads of vegetables unclaimed in Dhaka’s wholesale markets when they are unable to get the right prices of their produces.
   In his opinion, due to the existing disorganised supply-chain, a coconut that costs Tk 7 in the coastal districts sells at Tk 25 in Dhaka.
   Niaz also touched issues spanning from the government’s pledge to cut essential prices to the necessity of corporate management practice and corporate social responsibility.
   Agora has more than a hundred contract farmers in Jessore under a long-term plan. But, Niaz said, Agora has to sell those farmers’ produces on local market as its procurement department found transporting the vegetables from Jessore often unprofitable.
   Niaz detailed some noticeable facts revealed in an investigation by his company, for example why on many days Dhaka wholesale markets sell vegetables at much lower rates than others.
   ‘When they [farmers or local traders] find that spot prices have tumbled massively and calculate that the proceeds from selling their entire lots may not be enough even to pay their truck rents, they flee penniless abandoning truckloads of vegetables unclaimed,’ Niaz said.
   A number of wholesalers at the city’s Karwan Bazar verified the information, telling New Age that such happenings are quite common. When groups of farmers and traders from different parts of the country gather at the city’s wholesale hubs during the peak trading hours, between midnight and dawn, prices often tumble, they said.
   Truckers in such a situation go to the wholesale market committee concerned, which traditionally arrange auction of the abandoned vegetables to pay them the rents.
   Agora has found that although in the south-western Barguna district fish is much cheaper than in Dhaka, but the sellers in the bordering district find smuggling the fish to India more profitable than sending those to Dhaka, Niaz said. ‘The reasons include lack of proper marketing network and transports to bring the fish from Barguna to Dhaka in a short period.’

   Whether it is vegetable or fish or dressed chicken, if processing, sorting and cold storage centres are developed in the production areas and smooth and convenient transportation system is established to and from the end markets, things will improve, Niaz said.
   ‘Anyway, whatever an individual grower or retailer may think, it makes no sense until required or viable volumes are gathered in facilitated market places and a convenient network of commodity supply chain is developed,’ he observed.
   In this regard, the Rahimafrooz chief said, properly utilising the existing government facilities, a public-private partnership could help develop linkage between growers, local markets and end retailers.
   For instance, the Bangladesh Agricultural Development Corporation can support farmers with right seeds, soil tests and cold storage facilities, while the Bangladesh Railway and Bangladesh Road Transport Corporation can develop smooth transportation of commodities, he said.
   ‘River transportation also can make commodity-carrying cheaper,’ Niaz said, adding, ‘Although we are blessed with a huge network of rivers, river transportation of goods has become too insignificant, inviting private-sector investments here has great potentials.’
   Niaz termed the pledge made by the present government to reduce prices of essential commodities flawed, because, he said, ‘if supply chains are not managed, price stability is a remote possibility.’
   Automobile battery manufacturing is the major concern of the 54-year-old Rahimafrooz. It has stepped into retailing in 2001 by launching Agroa, under the banner of Rahimafrooz Superstores Limited . It has now four stores in Dhaka with a turnover of Tk 115 crore in 2008.
   Although sales have grown 20 per cent over the years yet Agora is still not a profitable organisation, as unorganised supply chains of many food commodities have kept all organised retailers in difficulty.
   Niaz said some 2,500 items or 55 per cent of Agrora products are food items.