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More than three years after the release of a preliminary report on the Agriculture Census-2019, the Bangladesh Bureau of Statistics (BBS) yesterday unveiled the final results without providing an actual estimate on the number of farmers in the country.
Instead, the BBS provided the number of farming households, which creates a big lapse in the data required to frame policies for the sector and ensuring food security, according to an economist.
This is because each household may have more than one farmer, making it difficult to gauge their total number.
The agriculture census, which is usually conducted every 10 years also did not take account of the number of poultry and livestock reared commercially across the country.
At the official launch of the fifth Agriculture Census-2019 at the BBS headquarters in Dhaka, Planning Minister MA Mannan said the exclusion of commercial poultry and livestock farming makes it difficult to get a real picture of the sector.
“The BBS should clearly include all poultry and livestock in its census,” he said, suggesting the BBS carry out the census in a reduced timeframe.
The BBS conducted the last agriculture census in 2008 while the one before that was in 1996.
In the 2019 census, the BBS found that the number of farming households increased 11 per cent to 1.68 crore from 1.5 crore in 2008. Meanwhile, the number of agricultural labour households also rose marginally to 92 lakh.
It also found that the net cultivable land declined 2 per cent, or 4.16 lakh acres, to 1.86 crore acres from 1.9 crore acres in 2008, according to a presentation by Alauddin Al Azad, project director of the census.
Azad then said the BBS only gathered household level information regarding the amount of agricultural land, ownership, irrigation system, land use, number of poultry and livestock.
Contacted, Prof Abdul Bayes, an economist and former vice-chancellor of Jahangirnagar University, said the exclusion of farmers’ data and commercial poultry and livestock production is a big omission in the census.
“Collecting data on the number of farmers was not a big issue for them [BBS officials]. It could have been easily done by adding it to the questionnaire,” he said.
He went on to say that the country’s commercial poultry production is increasing day by day, but the census does not provide any indication in this regard.
“Such a gap is not acceptable,” he said.
Shamsul Alam, the state minister for planning, criticised the BBS for delaying the delivery of the final results for more than three years.
After publishing the preliminary report in 2019, the BBS did not do any further research, he said while questioning why they still took more than three years to publish the final report.
Alam then said 11.5 per cent of Bangladesh’s gross domestic product comes from the agriculture sector, which also generates around 40 per cent of the country’s employment.
“Moreover, everybody needs to eat food, so we are highly dependent on the agriculture sector,” he added.
However, Alam did say that the census data, albeit lacking, is credible.
Md Matiar Rahman, director general of the BBS, acknowledged the lapse in data and assured that it would be addressed in the next census.
(TDS)
