THE country’s arable land mass is fast shrinking under a fast moving urbanization process thereby threatening future food security to an exponentially growing population. There is much talk now about it at the experts’ level who singularly blame the government failure in implementing the National Agriculture Policy-1999 which had sought to address the threats by regulating the use of land for non-agricultural purposes. News reports quoting a study of Soil Resource Institute said around 69,000 hectares of arable land across the country turn to non-agricultural use every year. It held responsible unplanned urbanisation, setting up of mills and factories, housing estates, construction of new roads, high ways and such other infrastructures for the switching of arable land to non-agricultural use.We know, Bangladesh is primarily an agrarian country. It depends on food production from local agriculture and has in fact achieved a near self-sufficiency for quite sometime. But the nation’s dependence on imports of wheat, pulses, edible oil, sugar and milk products remains high because production diversity is yet to be achieved. The country has only 14.4 million hectares of land including 8.52 million hectares of arable land. But if the switching of the land to non-agricultural use continues at its present scale, agriculture may face the biggest setback in the near future as land for farming may eventually become very scarce.It is to be noted that the contribution of the agriculture sector to the country’s GDP now stands at 18 percent while it was 33.07 percent 34 years ago in 1980. It showed that the economy is experiencing a rapid transition towards industrialisation. But looking at it from other perspective, over 70 percent of the total labour force is still engaged in the agriculture sector and 55 percent of them are engaged in rice production. In such a situation, the dependence on agriculture to keep the rural people employed is still too high. Moreover, the country can’t become dependent on the global market for rice imports to feed the growing number of population which now stands at around 160 million. It means we must have a very pro-active land use policy to protect agricultural land by increasing the efficiency of land use for food production along with enhancing its efficiency in industrial use. Land use efficiency may be increased by switching to fast breeding crops for agriculture. Industry may also expand plants vertically and use state of the art technology to save land. This is how Japan and Taiwan have addressed their land shortage problems and Bangladesh must quickly learn the lessons from them. Meanwhile, the Ministry of Agriculture has been blamed for failing to complete the multi-crop zoning areas even in four years thus delaying the passage of Agricultural Land Protection Zoning Act- 2010. It may partly protect farmlands from unplanned urbanisation and real estate expansion. Moreover buying of agricultural land by urban people may be banned like in India to keep arable land in the hands of farming families. There may be many more ways and we suggest a broad based awareness must created in the first place among the people about the future risks of rapidly switching land to non-agricultural use outside the cities and in the countryside.
