DESPITE a huge gap in salt prices between the farmers’ and the consumers’ levels, middlemen and mill owners reap those profits of locally manufactured salt leaving the poor farmers in the lurch. According to news in media, middlemen and mill owners pay between Tk four and six for each kg of salt they buy from the farmers but sell it to consumers at Tk. 30 after refining it. It shows that the real producers are getting lower revenues than that of middlemen and owners, which is contrary to business ethics as it leaves the marginal classes viciously marginalized.
About 5 lakh people are engaged directly and indirectly in salt production and marketing, including 55,000 marginal salt producers in Cox’s Bazar, according to the BSCIC. The plights of salt producers are enormous. They often face financial hardship as they don’t get a fair price. As the earning becomes lower than the production cost, many are discouraged to go on all-out production leaving several thousand acres unutilized. These marginal farmers, long deprived, in torn cloths, work barefoot making piles of sun dried salt. They sell the raw salt to the processing factories after drying the seawater in the sun for five days. In spite of this hard work in producing salt, consumers across the country pay over 10 times the price the farmers get for per kilogram of salt. TIB reports’ 08 said that the salt farmers bear 97.7 percent of production costs to get only 54 percent of the sale proceed, while land owners and brokers pocket the rest. Besides, salt farmers cannot even recover the production costs as salt processing companies import inferior raw salt from India and Myanmar at cheap rates.
Without having any policy, the country’s salt sector remains one of the most neglected sectors over the years since independence. Finally, the government made a National Salt Policy in 2011 to protect the interests of all stakeholders including the farmers, mill owners and consumers. The policy is exists only on paper, but not in execution fully due to the negligence of authority concerned and some influential’s undue inclusion in salt cultivation. A report said that influentials own most of the salt growing lands and lease those to landless salt farmers, who grow salt on contract basis. As the country earns around Tk1500 crore revenue from the sector per annum, government should consider the salt cultivation as agriculture, not industry and salt farmers should be provided with subsidy to boost the sector. A Salt Board is needed to monitor cultivation so that middlemen and owners could not reap the profits of marginalized farmers who utilize their almost vigor to produce salt. A Salt Board is also important to bring to an end to the illegal salt import from India and Myanmar as forbidden by National Salt Policy 2011.
