Rayhan Ahmed Topader :
WFP is the world’s leading humanitarian agency fighting hunger worldwide, delivering food assistance in emergencies and working with communities to improve nutrition and build resilience. Each year, WFP assists some 80 million people in around 80 countries.The CSP Bangladesh is budgeted at USD 201.6 million and reflects an evolution in WFP’s way of working from being a deliverer of food assistance to an enabler of governments to achieve national hunger solutions. WFP will work to improve malnutrition, to ensure access to food, to support sustainable food systems, and to support emergency preparedness activities. WFP will be capitalising on decades of operational experience in Bangladesh and around the world to support the government with technical assistance, operational know-how and evidence to inform policies. A large proportion of WFP’s activities will still be dedicated to the direct distribution of food or cash assistance, particularly to food insecure populations in Cox’s Bazar and the Chittagong Hill Tracts. Bangladesh’s progress in reducing poverty, hunger and undernutrition is highly impressive and the Government has committed to continue this journey for the country to achieve its full social and economic potential. said WFP Representative Christa Räder. Over the next four years WFP aims to support the Government in enhancing its social safety nets for women and children towards nutrition outcomes.
Over 90 million children under the age of five are dangerously underweight. And one person in every four still goes hungry in Africa.The Sustainable Development Goals aim to end all forms of hunger and malnutrition by 2030, making sure all people especially children and the more vulnerable have access to sufficient and nutritious food all year round. This involves promoting sustainable agricultural practices: improving the livelihoods and capacities of small scale famers, allowing equal access to land, technology and markets. It also requires international cooperation to ensure investment in infrastructure and technology to improve agricultural productivity. Together with the other goals set out here, we can end hunger by 2030.
According to the World Food Programme, Bangladesh’s progress is too slow for it to meet its current targets. For example, stunting will need to decline by 5.3 percent per year if the government’s target for the year 2021 is to be achieved, but the rate at which it has actually declined in the recent past is only about 2.5 percent. According to the 2014 Global Nutrition Report, Bangladesh is not on course for meeting any of the 2025 targets agreed upon at the World Health Assembly in 2012. This is not sufficient progress, and will not help the country achieve the fully developed country status by 2041, as the government has proclaimed as an aspiration. So how can we develop?
It goes without saying that farming needs to modernise urgently and become more environmentally sustainable at the same time. The rate of pesticide use is far too high and is a danger to health. People need to adopt healthier diets with more varied fruits and vegetables. One of the recent success stories has been the rapid adoption of Bt brinjal by Bangladeshi farmers. Brinjal, or eggplant (or begun), is an important culinary vegetable but has historically suffered from severe pest infestation and resulting in high rates of pesticide contamination. Since the Bt Brinjal was deployed by Bangladesh Agricultural Research Institute (BARI), some 33,000 smallholder farmers-about 20 percent of the nation’s total brinjal farmers – have begun to grow the crop. Overall, they have reportedly experienced a 61 percent reduction in pesticide use and a six-fold increase in income. In addition to more varieties of Bt brinjal, public-sector scientists in Bangladesh are also engaged in collaborative efforts to develop local varieties of high-yielding rice enriched with vitamin A, potatoes resistant to the devastating late blight disease, which is currently controlled through the application of fungicides, and pest-resistant cotton that also can help farmers curtail their pesticide use.
All of these can contribute to a better situation for smallholder farmers and improved nutrition. However, many NGOs have spread misinformation about these improved crops because of fears about GMOs and suchlike. Again, the interests of farmers are not served by attempts to keep them in poverty without agricultural improvements.Today it is time to leave the arguments of the past behind and to focus on improving the situation for farmers in Bangladesh, as part of a wider effort to reduce poverty and also tackle malnutrition more widely. With the thoughts of people everywhere on achieving Zero Hunger on the World Food Day, there is not a moment to lose.
In the near future it is also possible that climate finance will come into Bangladesh to fund practices to sequester carbon in soils and vegetation, either via the Green Climate Fund or for offsetting emissions in other countries. Such developments could set agriculture, and rural livelihoods, in new directions. Further challenges and opportunities are presented by changes in Bangladeshi diets towards more meat, milk, fish, fruit and vegetables which are crucial for improving nutrition. However, new paths bring new risks; even sustainable agricultural methods may have risks attached. Changing agricultural practices may require new finance, new ways of working and living, new skills and knowledge and willingness and capacity to experiment.These raise social concerns. Who stands to benefit, and who decides what will be done and how? If changes are implemented in certain ways poor farmers and farm labourers could benefit and see production and wages rise, but if not, then they could finish up even poorer.
And what happens to poor people in cities who are at the end of food chains? In the broader context of national development, how can the circle be squared that people need electricity, and better energy sources for cooking, but despite Bangladesh’s well-earned reputation as a solar leader, and the need for global coal phase-out by 2050, the country is banking on coal as the main way to meet energy demand? On the other hand, utility-scale solar plants of the size being built in, for example, India, could run the risk of competing for scarce agricultural land. Food commitments and climate commitments, developments in agriculture and energy, raise the question, what sort of future do people want? What might ideally Bangladesh look like in 10 or 20 or more years? Seemingly contradictory aspects of national policies and potential social impacts raise the issue: how do societies discuss the ways forward? How do they identify paths that will help to achieve the dual goals of more and better food and lower emissions? How do they identify potential co-benefits on the one hand, and possible conflicts and places where there will have to be trade-offs on the other? And in that process, whose voices will be heard and whose interests will be represented in these decisions? Who gets to decide? There is always the risk that the people who are poor and most vulnerable to shocks to their livelihoods and to climatic hazards, will find themselves effectively excluded from the debate.
American senator Daniel Webster once said, when tillage begins, the other arts follow. The farmers, therefore, are the founders of human civilization. The agriculture sector is a laggard in the fast changing economic landscape of the country. The farmer, the first participant of the economy, has to be supported to achieve the highest production and productivity and must be ensured a larger share of profit along the value chain.
