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Bangladesh has to rely on imports to meet about 15 per cent of the demand of the spice market, which highlighted the foreign currencies the country has to spend to bring in the items as well as the potential for local production.
The country produces 49.30 lakh tonnes of spices against an annual demand of 58.50 lakh tonnes, said Shailendra Nath Mozumder, principal scientific officer of state-run Spice Research Center in Bogura.
The remaining 9.20 tonnes of spices are imported, meaning a lot of foreign currencies have to be spent to meet the entire demand.
“This also shows the potential for increasing the production of spices locally,” Mozumder told The Daily Star yesterday.
He said about 50 types of spices are used in Bangladesh in food preparation. Of them, 30 are grown locally.
The principal scientific officer made a presentation on the spice sector during a workshop as part of the “Improved varieties of spices and technology expansion project” at the Department of Agricultural Extension in the capital yesterday.
He said it is possible to reduce the shortage of spices by widening the cultivation of 51 high-yield varieties and using 156 modern technologies developed by the Spice Research Centre and the Bangladesh Agricultural Research Institute.
Mozumder, also the director of the project, said the production of spice crops should be expanded along with cereal, vegetables and fruits in order to reduce import dependence.
During the workshop, Wahida Akter, secretary of the agriculture ministry, said through the implementation of the project, the production of spices in the area under the project would be raised by 5 per cent and the rate of import of spices would decrease.
“High-quality varieties of spices have been developed in the research institutes of Bangladesh. We will have to try to meet our demand by widening the production of the crops domestically.”
She said farmers would grow spice crops only if they benefit from it.
In Bangladesh, the acreage under spice cultivation rose 1.7 times between 2000 and 2021, according to the presentation of Mozumder. The yield surged 5.4 times and the production rocketed 9.1 times in the two decades.
(TDS)
