The government should give importance to the agriculture sector, social safety net programmes, and job creation in the upcoming national budget in order to ensure food security and reduce the Covid-induced economic shock on the country s new poor, according to experts.
Besides, the repeated heatwaves and pest damage hampered agriculture throughout the past year while the two nationwide lockdowns also had an impact on the market, particularly the poultry and dairy sectors.
This made the food supply chain volatile and had adverse effects on retail.
The US Department of Agriculture said that boro paddy cultivation may decline by 1.5 per cent this session due to the recent heatwave and pest attacks in Bangladesh.
The small, marginal and landless farmers together account for around 70 to 80 per cent of the country s food production, said agricultural analysts.
Of them, small farmers who own between 1 to 2.5 acres of land operate around 40 per cent of the total farmland and contribute 50 per cent to the food production, said Prof Abdul Bayes, former director of the Research and Evaluation Division of Brac.
And marginal farmers who own on an average of 50 decimals of land operate nearly 7 per cent of land.
Meanwhile, a section of marginal farmers also grow food by leasing land. So, together with marginal farmers, both landless and marginal farmers operate around 20 per cent of the total cultivable land through leases, according to Bayes.