Legal measures to conserve farmlands

The urgency of framing a law to safeguard farmlands from being irreversibly reduced in size due to natural causes such as river erosion as well as human actions triggering climate change cannot be overstated. Efforts to this end have been made by the land ministryin the past, for instance, in the form of a draft proposal, namely,  the 'Land Ownership and Uses Act' , which would limit the ownership of non-agricultural land to 40 bighas (1 bigha = 33 decimals). The aim of the proposed Act was to protect agricultural land. Similar laws such as the Agricultural Land Protection and Land Zoning Act 2010 and Agricultural Land Protection and Usage Act 2016 were introduced in the past. Notably, those laws were updated and revised over time.

The High Court, too, in April 2024, recommended passing the private bill (originally tabled in parliament in March 2022) that sought steps in 2016 towards appropriate use and conservation of agricultural land. Side by side with the moves to frame laws to conserve arable land, experts also emphasised proper land management to address environmental issues and control commercial farming, particularly tobacco cultivation and shrimp culture that lead to land degradation and decline in crop yield.  Concerns have been expressed during  the past decades over the progressive decline in the quantity of available farmlands in the country. Meanwhile, the amount of cultivable land has been shrinking due to its transfer to non-agricultural  sectors including  road building, operating brick fields, housing and industrial  estates. According to a Bangladesh Agricultural Research Council (BARC) document, between 1976 and 2021, i.e. in 45 years, Bangladesh lost 1.048 million hectares of land to non-agricultural use. In a similar vein, according to the Ministry of Agriculture, country's total amount of agricultural land, as of 2023, stood at 8.829 million hectares.

In a land-scarce country like Bangladesh, loss of arable land to non-farm use is no doubt a bad news for food security. Even so, production of staple crops, especially rice has about quadrupled from 10 million tonnes in 1972-73 to 39 million tonnes recently, thanks to the use of high-yielding varieties of seeds, better inputs including irrigation, fertilisers, pesticides and more efficient land use and cropping practice. But one cannot at the same time lose sight of the fact that it  has all come at a cost. Because, in absence of additional fallow land, the same land is being used repeatedly to produce multiple crops. Though the application of chemical fertilizers and pesticides has helped achieve higher yields of crops, the quality of soil has been diminishing irreparably. All the scientific agricultural practices have so far contributed to breaking past record of crop yields, but the hard facts are that limited amount of land, which, again, is diminishing without a pause, cannot guarantee food security for an ever-growing size of population for  a long time.

Against this not-so-reassuring background, the interim government is learnt to have promised to accelerate efforts to frame a law to protect agricultural land as well as the interests of farmers. In this connection, the Home and Agriculture Adviser, Md Jahangir Alam Chowdhury during a press briefing recently has reiterated the interim government's determination to soon enact a suitable law. It is believed the incumbent administration would be up to its promise and fast track its plan to enact the law to protect agricultural lands, since its tenure in office is short.