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The Food Planning and Monitoring Unit (FPMU) under the Ministry of Food has revealed interesting findings on the size of agricultural land being reported to be lost every year in Bangladesh. Knowing fully well about the nexus between agricultural land availability and food security, it becomes obvious that reduction in the availability of agricultural land duly raises a concern for food security of the burgeoning population. Land, as an important argument in the food production function and a source of household income, tends to influence both the availability of and the access to food.
This write-up has been prepared following a policy brief titled 'Shrinking availability of agricultural land in Bangladesh: New evidence' prepared by the Food Planning and Monitoring Unit (FPMU) of the Ministry of Food of the Government of Bangladesh, with the assistance of the National Food Policy Capacity Strengthening Programme (NFPCSP). The NFPCSP is jointly implemented by the FPMU and the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO). The full policy brief is available on http://fpmu.gov.bd. While preparing this article, the policy brief has been paraphrased to some extent.
Over four-fifths of the land in Bangladesh, covering cropland, forests, water bodies, and aquaculture and tea estates, is reported to be under agriculture. This appears to be one of the highest rates across the globe. There is no shade of doubt that infrastructural development and urbanisation have cost our valuable land for economic growth. The attainment of goals enshrined in the government's Vision 2021 will further push agricultural land to the frontiers of other uses. "But the process needs careful management to ensure that this scarce resource is optimally used. Raising the productivity of the available agricultural land, and better land management from competing priorities, would help protect food security."
How much agricultural land has been lost? Land-use data in Bangladesh are based on periodic agricultural censuses, sample surveys and sample aerial photographs. None of these, however, cover all land uses and so any snapshot must be constructed from different data and interpolations. Land records are not only undigitised here, but also these are usually outdated and inaccurate. It is thus no wonder that the lion share of the dispute settlements in rural Bangladesh is related to land.
A recent study has addressed this empirical challenge by analysing satellite images, and triangulating this information with ground truthing surveys and existing data. The study provides new and scientifically rigorous land use data for 1976, 2000 and 2010. Whatever may be the source or year, it is true that agriculture still dominates land use in Bangladesh at roughly 9.0 million hectares. Land declined steadily since 1976 and markedly after 2000. Cropland declined by 1.0 million hectares since 1976, whilst an equivalent area went to rural and urban settlements and industry.
Non-crop agricultural uses slightly declined too. Taken together, the paper of the FPMU argues that land used for agriculture declined at 0.26 per cent annually between 1976 and 2010 - faster after 2000 at 0.45 per cent, compared to 0.18 per cent before 2000. "Bangladesh's agricultural land shrank from 186 hectares per thousand people in 1976 to 81 in 2010 and cropland shrank from 137 per thousand people to just 58. Such massive reductions in land availability might have jeopardised food security. But fortunately, the county could cover up the losses through productivity.
In fact, productivity gains more than compensated for the loss. For example, even whilst cropland per person declined annually by 2.5 per cent since 1976, crop production per person increased annually at 1.2 per cent in tonnage and 1.1 per cent in real value. This meant increased food availability and agricultural income per hectare". Decentr-alised and locally-informed planning could further boost productivity by exploiting variations across the country. The FPMU paper then goes on disaggregated picture of the scenario of land decline that can at times be paraphrased. It argues that different places face different land pressures. Annual rates of decline of agricultural land between 1976 and 2010 ranged from 0.52 to just 0.02 per cent across divisions.
The contrast between Khulna and Kushtia districts, and also both within the same Division, illustrates the potential for locally-informed planning amidst diversity. For example, Kushtia's area is only a quarter of Khulna's, and yet its crop production is 1.6 times as large. Land loss in Kushtia would on an average have six times the impact on crop production as in Khulna. Kushtia manages a cropping intensity of 256 per cent and irrigation coverage of 73 per cent, compared to Khulna's at just 134 per cent and 37 per cent, respectively. Bangladesh has officially 30 agro-ecological zones. Decentr-alised information on the qualitative composition and conservation of land, as well as the diverse pressures on it, should be part of agricultural land management.
COMPETING NATIONAL PRIORITIES: This suggests the importance of multi-sectoral approaches in land management to resolve competing claims. n Forests, including mangrove forests, declined massively with implications inter alia for the country's climate change adaptation goals. n The huge increase in accreted land in coastal and river systems, equivalent to 0.3 times lost cropland, offers agricultural potential but faces fragile agro-ecology, livelihoods, and land rights. n Land went overwhelmingly to rural settlement, which dwarfed urban and industrial gains by 14 times.
However, even though the population doubled since 1976, the density of rural settlement in Bangladesh remained unchanged, ranging from 22 hectares per thousand people in Sylhet division to just 9.0 in Khulna, which provides considerable scope for housing policy. n Urbanisation and industry have made relatively modest demands on land. Urbanisation, however, seems partly driven by land availability - for example in western divisions, greater rural-to-urban migration coincided with greater agricultural land decline between 2000 and 2010 (1.6 times and 1.4 times, respectively, relative to eastern divisions).
RECENT DEVELOPMENTS AND POLICY GAPS: Several existing policies and plans, including on food, agriculture, climate change adaptation and development of the southern delta, if successfully implemented, would help protect food security, use accreted land more effectively and support de-agrarianisation through greater agricultural productivity. The government intends to develop an Agricultural Land Protection and Land Use Act, and to prepare a roadmap to bring land use under a single authority, which are steps in the right direction. For any land use policy to have impact, deep partnerships and commitments from stakeholders with diverse interests need to be accelerated. Policy gaps in rural housing should be considered in the National Five-Year Plans. The idea of "compact rural townships", mentioned in the National Sustainable Development Strategy 2010-21, needs urgent elaboration to slow the huge horizontal expansion of rural settlement.
One of the important messages received is that agricultural land in Bangladesh has not been declining by 1.0 per cent per year as has been claimed by different research papers. The good news is that land decline is about one-thirds of what has been claimed so far. In this sense it has serious policy implications. However, we reckon that the paper could cast some suggestions as to the importance of a proper land use policy in Bangladesh and the effectiveness of the existing land use policy in a regime of declining land and food security.
Abdul Bayes is a former Professor of Economics at Jahangirnagar University.