Agricultural growth witnesses 11-year low

Country`s agricultural growth has witnessed an 11-year low in the current fiscal year as farmers, disheartened by low prices of rice, reduced cultivation of the major crop, agriculturists and economists said.

The sector that included sub-sectors like crops and horticulture, animal farming and forest, grew by only 1.18 per cent in the current FY 2012-13, according to the provisional data released by Bangladesh Bureau of Statistics last week.

Before this fiscal year, the lowest growth in agriculture sector in last 11 year was a negative 0.62 per cent in the FY 2001-2002, showed the Bangladesh Economic Review.

The sector grew by 5.56 per cent in 2009-2010 buoyed by bumper production of rice before coming down to 2.46 per cent in FY 2011-2012.

‘Farmers across the country had heavily cultivated boro and aman paddy in the previous few years and got bumper production but they had been disappointed with low prices of produces,’ said an official of the Department of Agriculture Extension.

He said that farmers this year had reduced acreage of boro paddy while the growth of aman production was minimal.

‘The lack of growth of these two major crops might have resulted in lower growth of agriculture sector,’ he said.
The BBS data showed that the crops and horticulture sub-sectors that included rice grew by only 0.15 per cent in the current fiscal year against 1.95 per cent in the previous FY12.

As this sub-sector is the major contributor of the agriculture sector, the slightly increased growth of animal farming and forest sub-sectors could not pull up the growth of overall sector.

The animal farming sub-sector grew by 3.49 per cent against 3.39 per cent and forest sub-sector grew by 4.47 per cent against 4.42 per cent respectively in the previous FY.

Bangladesh Institute of Development Studies director general Mustafa K Mujeri told New Age that there was a bumper growth of rice in the previous fiscal year. ‘So, there was a bumper growth this year, the overall sectoral growth would have been higher,’ he said.

He said that lower price of rice might have affected the cultivation of the crop. ‘But as we are yet to get the full production details of boro, we do not know the impact of boro on the sectoral growth,’ he said.

The BBS data also showed that the share of agriculture in the overall GDP has fallen every year in the last one decade with the rise of manufacturing sector.

The share of agriculture in the GDP was 19.51 per cent in FY 2000-2001 which came down to 13.66 per cent in FY 2012-2013.