Mohammad Masud Majumder:
Fisheries and Livestock Advisor Farida Akhtar said, “While emphasizing food security, the farmers’ side is not seen in that way. Efforts are being made to harm farmers through imports to keep food supply and prices affordable for urban people. We need to achieve food sovereignty so that both consumers and farmers benefit. Therefore, along with consumer food security, the interests of farmers must also be considered.”
The advisor made this statement while delivering the chief guest speech at the first session of the ‘Agriculture, Food Security and Farmers’ Fairness Conference 2025′ organized by Pan Pacific Sonargaon Business News this morning.
The Fisheries and Livestock Advisor said, there is talk of mechanization in agriculture. We need to see whether we are doing any harm by doing that. Because due to this, the use of livestock is decreasing. Here, we need to look at the consumer side so that they get safe food. Again, we need to look at the farmer side so that they can profit from production. If we destroy life and nature while producing food, will it still be a food product? It will become an industrial product. If we produce agricultural products like industrial products, it will not be food and there will be no farmers.
The advisor said, once upon a time, fish and animal resources were under agriculture. Now they have become separate. Product-based farmers have also become separate. In the case of fish, if we see, Bangladesh is in second place after India in catching fish from open water bodies. Yet we are destroying haors, rivers and canals. When we want to protect water bodies, we see that fish are dying due to pesticides used in agriculture.
Stating that pesticides cannot be used in haors, he said, “Haors are a huge source of fish. Many times, weeds are destroyed with pesticides instead of cleaning them. This is harming cows, goats and other animals. We have also seen incidents where goats have died after eating the waste from the land. Because there were pesticides there. But people are also eating that waste! Therefore, a policy needs to be adopted here. Awareness needs to be created at the farmer level regarding these issues.”
He also said, “Currently, our meat production here is much more than the demand. When the price of eggs increased due to the August floods, the Ministry of Commerce imported eggs. At that time, the producers here were affected. Now, requests are being made to import meat from the United States, Brazil, and Argentina. They will provide meat at a lower price. Now, we have millions of farmers. We have a stock of more than 12.4 million cows and goats here. There are about 2.2 million more than the demand. If we do this, the farmers here will not be able to survive.”
The conference was moderated by Dewan Hanif Mahmud, Editor and Publisher of Banik Barta, and was attended by Secretary of the Ministry of Agriculture Dr. Mohammad Emdad Ullah Mian as the guest of honor. The panelists were Professor Dr. AK Fazlul Haque Bhuiyan, Vice Chancellor of Bangladesh Agricultural University, Dr. Jahangir Alam, Former Director General of Bangladesh Livestock Research Institute, Mohammad Mustafa Haider, Group Director of TK Group, Dr. FH Ansari, President of ACI Agri Business Division, KSM Mostafizur Rahman, Managing Director of National Agricare Group, and senior government and private officials.
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