Admission of failure to curb not enough

AMM Shawkat Ali, Adviser for food and disaster management told at a seminar on ‘Food Security in Bangladesh’ that ‘rice prices have reached unbearable levels in recent times,’ while the commerce adviser, Hossain Zillur Rahman, when talking to journalists on the sidelines of the South Asian Sociology Conference, said prices of some essentials have become ‘sensitive’ for the ordinary people. Whereas Shawkat Ali suggested production of ‘rice and other grains on fallow land to lessen food imports’ and thus keep the prices down, Hossain Zillur was less forthcoming. The government, said the commerce adviser, is examining the factors that make the market unstable time and again and ‘will come up with fresh strategies in a day or two to keep the market stable’. We do not know what strategies the government would churn out ‘in a day or two’ and we are not particularly too keen to find out because, as we have written in these columns time and again, the cure to market volatility lies in adequate and uninterrupted supply, effective and sustained monitoring, and market intervention as and when required. Needless to say, the interim government has repeatedly failed on all three counts in the past one year or so of its tenure despite timely warnings from relevant experts and also the media. The current spate of price spiral of essential commodities, especially rice, has been due largely to the lack of foresight and homework on the part of the government.  True, the back-to-back floods and cyclone Sidr in 2007 damaged standing crops on large swathes of land and contributed to production shortfall and subsequent strain on the government’s buffer stock. True, the prices of food grains on the international market have climbed steadily and a number of major food producing countries have imposed certain restrictions on export to ensure internal food security in the face of such market volatility and also a dwindling global food stocks. However, it is also true that the government was warned of the shortfall of food grains, first by the Asian Development Bank and then politicians and leading economists as early as in November 2007. Had the government acted then and tried to replenish its buffer stock we might not have faced the shortage that we are in now. Now that the government has owned up to its failure to keep the prices of rice and other essential commodities within the reach of the ordinary people, we would expect it act fast and act in earnest. In the short term, it has to ensure adequate import of food grains and other essentials and also subsidise the prices to keep them within the affordability of the majority. Here, it is imperative that the government take confidence-building measures so as to involve the private sector in the import of essentials. In the long term, as the food adviser suggested on Monday and as we have said many times before, it has to take effective steps to expand food crop acreage and ensure adequate agricultural inputs at subsidised rates for the farmers to make such expansion worthwhile. Finally, the government should realise that not only the prices of rice and some other essentials but many other factors, e.g. lack of employment, have also made life for the majority ‘unbearable’.