Md Bayazid Khan :
Ensuring food security for all is one of the major challenges that Bangladesh faces today. Despite significant achievements in production and availability, food security still remains a matter of major concern for Bangladesh. The country has made significant progress in increasing domestic production of food grains. This helped overcoming the constraints of national food availability. Yet the acquired food sufficiency is not supportive to fulfill the condition of maintaining sustainable food security. The three pillars of food security as defined by the World Health Organization (WHO) are:
Food availability- relates to the supply of food through domestic production or import, distribution through smooth marketing and exchange.
Food access- refers to the affordability and allocation of food, as well as the preferences of individuals and households and depends on household income, assets, remittances, gifts, borrowing etc.
Food utilization- refers to moth metabolism of food as well as effective use of food within households and communities.
Here are some scenarios regarding production, consumption and utilization of food in Bangladesh.
1. Last few years the country witnessed a bountiful harvest that has been overshadowed by the grief of farmers due to the low price of crops. Confronting the selling price that is half the cost of production, farmers were compelled to set fire to their paddy field or throw their production to the highway.
2. Big size but costly fishes (Hilsha, Rui, Boal etc), scarce and sea fishes, meat, nutritious food items like butter, ghee, cheese, yogurt etc, essential food like oil except rice, wheat etc are found available in the market but not affordable to millions of people. Despite having the deepest appetite for the aforesaid food items, their income didn’t allow them to buy.
3. It was witnessed in the days before lockdown started due to the pandemic, some people bought huge amounts of essential food items, fishes, chickens, meats etc that created artificial food shortages at local markets and eventually encouraged sellers to price hiking. As a result, these sorts of panic create a huge burden to millions of poor people, daily laborers and low-income peoples on their accessibility and affordability to food.
4. Trash bins or waste bins in front of community centers or hotels/restaurants or households usually found a huge amount of wasted or misused costly cooked foods.
The above-mentioned scenarios clearly indicate that food insecurity exists in Bangladesh because of poor food access and utilization of food as overall availability is good and average dietary supply adequacy has been over 100 percent since the 2000s.
Therefore, indispensable responsibility of the government is to bring inclusiveness in food access as well as proper utilization of food consumption with a view to ensure food security. In addition, the government needs to continue availability of food grains by taking initiatives of increasing domestic production of food grains keeping pace with the increased number of population.
Government may introduce selling of big and scarce costly fishes into pieces or minimum metric units of weight (100g, 200g, 250g) to the retail market as well as all kinds of meats also minimum metric units of weight to make these food items affordable and accessible to all sections of people. Beside, nutritious dairy food items, oil and other essential items, fruits etc may become affordable and accessible to all people keeping the provision of selling these into minimum metric units.
Rationing system might be introduced in regards to selling essential commodities by retailers to remove bad practice of buying huge amounts of commodities during crises or unwanted situations created artificially by spreading rumours.
Making a law of giving fine/penalty must prohibit misuses of foods at households, hotels, community centers, picnic spots etc. Moreover, awareness programs might be broadcasted on social and electronic media to keep people away from misusing food.
Government should be stressed on continuing bumper production of paddy, wheat, vegetables, sweet water fishes, dairy products, indigenous fruits etc. Regarding these, farmers should encourage by ensuring their profession is profitable along with selling their production without facing hazards dispelling intervention of middlemen. Introduction of co-operative farming might be encouraged. Providing subsidies to real farmers for using sophisticated equipment/machines to introduce agro-machineries instead of using primitive methods of cultivation should continue on a large scale. Farmers need more training and support by agriculture department officials. Marketing system of agro-production should be comfortable and hazard free. Regarding this, an air-conditioned goods train and transport system might be introduced for safe transportation of vegetables, perishable fruits and fishes to different destinations of the country. Chain shop owners may encourage buying food grains directly from farmers with justified market prices. Government may establish agro based industries, air-conditioned warehouses under Public-Private Partnership at places renowned for enormous production of food grains.
(The writer works for primary education in Bangladesh. Email: [email protected]).
