Govt targets 36.4m MT rice production in FY19

The government has set a target of producing at 36.4 million metric tonnes of rice (MT) in the current fiscal with an emphasis on high yielding variety.

Officials said the Department of Agricultural Extension (DAE) already has sent the proposed crop production target to the Agriculture Ministry for final approval, reports BSS on Wednesday.

As per the target, 2.7 million tonnes of Aus rice, 14.1 million tonnes of Aman and 19.6 million tonnes of Boro will be produced in FY19.

Of the total targeted rice output, 4.66 million tonnes is hybrid, almost 29.8 million tonnes high-yielding variety and the rest 1.6 million tonnes local variety rice.

Director General (DG) of the Department of Agricultural Extension (DAE) Mohammad Mohsin said that they are confident to achieve the food production target if there is no natural disaster in the country.

Citing an example of Aus and Aman production, the DAE chief said, “We had set a target to produce Aus on 1.12 million hectares of land across the country but we produced rice on 11,52,225 hectares.”

For Aman production, the DAE had set the land target of 5.32 million hectares.

But the achievement was 104 per cent, the DAE official added.

As price of rice is comparatively more than the other agricultural products, “we had no problem in fulfilling the target,” he noted.

In addition to this, the DAE has also set a production target of nearly 1.3 million tonne wheat on 390,000 hectares of land this year.

The wheat production in 2017-18 was 1.15 million tonnes from 352,000 hectares of land.

The DAE has set the target to produce 4.1 million tonnes of maize on 474,000 hectares of land this year while the maize production was 3.89 million tonne last year from 447,000 hectares of land.

Besides, the government has fixed a target to produce 10.8 million tonnes of potato in the current fiscal year while it was 13 million tonnes last year.