ADULTERATED vegetable seeds, using the labels of the high yielding varieties is seriously affecting the country’s vegetable farming. A report in a national daily on Sunday said that most seeds packages now easily available in market claiming to be of high yielding variety hardly match to the promised quality. The farmers are often cheated as they could not determine the quality of those seeds so marketed by dishonest seeds traders using brand names. That’s why in most cases farmers incur huge losses when they purchase seeds from unauthorized vendors. The report quoted experts as suggesting that the government should beef up monitoring to curb sales of adulterated vegetable seeds and promote research to ensure farmers access to high quality seeds. If we can give good seeds to farmers, farm productivity will rise and cheating to farmers will end.
Bangladesh over the last decade has seen significant improvement in vegetable production. There are more than 60 types of vegetables and about 300 varieties cultivated in the country. According to the Food and Agriculture Organization, Bangladesh is the third largest vegetable producer in the world, and the largest in Asia. Seeds play the most important role for sustainable crop production. Only quality seeds can increase 15-20 percent yield potentiality and it is true for all crops including vegetables. But the government is not giving enough attention to it. Moreover, there is a lack of coordination and overlapping of functions of various agencies responsible for ensuring the quality of seeds.
Estimation said the reality is that most of these extremely poor vegetable farmers were either using low yielding retained seeds or buying small volume of adulterated seeds from mobile seed vendors (MSVs).
Thus there is a market failure purely because of high transaction cost. Besides, cultivators being uneducated and unaware of the seeds quality purchase low quality seeds with unauthorized brand and sow it ahead of the season to make higher profits. In those cases, the output is not of good quality even if they use good seeds.
In this perspective, experts suggest that a review of seed certification and quality control regulations to set standards for various types of seeds, and strengthening the capacity of the Seed Certification Agency (SCA). The government should take immediate initiative for enhancing capacity of SCA and turning it into a full-fledged authority. The regulatory status of SCA is long over due for curbing the marketing of adulterated vegetable seeds.
