The Commerce Ministry has alleged that the Agricultural Ministry does not provide accurate data, especially on production of foods and the number of consumers, for which it becomes hard for them to check market instability. Mentioning frequent price fluctuations of onion, Commerce Minister Tipu Munshi on Sunday blamed the Agriculture Ministry saying that country’s yearly onion consumption is 25 to 26 lakh metric tons and Agricultural Ministry claims that country’s production is also 25 to 26 lakh metric tons. He asked if the data is correct, then why it needs to import onions. It’s a good question. We earlier said several times that data of onion import and its local production is totally conflicting. Not only that, the same thing is happening in the case of other essential commodities, particularly rice.
The prices of rice have been in an increasing trend for the last several years. It was not possible for the government to harness the rice price despite taking several initiatives, including duty cuts. What’s interesting is that Agriculture Minister Muhammad Abdur Razzaque a few months ago complained that there was no exact data on population and the demand for rice. He was explaining the reasons behind the shortage of rice in the country. The Bangladesh Bureau of Statistics and the Department of Agricultural Extension said the country produced 6 per cent more rice year-on-year to 3.86 crore tonnes in fiscal 2020-21. There is another wonderful information that one mound paddy is produced on every decimal of land, even then rice has to be imported for various reasons. This means, providing fake and fattened data by the authorities concerned is an old practice.
There is no up to date statistics on the country’s population as new population census has not been conducted yet after 2001. But the exact size of population is very important to ascertain the demand for food and other essentials. We can give one example here. The price of potato has been increasing in the last couple of years. The Agriculture Ministry last year announced that about one crore 5 lakh tons of potatoes would be produced and 70-75 lakh tons to be consumed. If so, there should be a surplus of potatoes. But the country’s markets do not tell the same story. So, the question comes again – why they give fattened data on production. The answer is simple – they apparently want to show their success. There might be another reason -that is syndicated business. But sometimes this tactic backfires when common people become annoyed at being unable to bear extra burden. Fabricated information and fattened data could serve political purposes but it never brings any good for the common people.
