Populous Bangladesh hopes to triple its production of the Aus variety of rice to 4.5 million tonnes a year by using high-yielding seeds it has imported from Uganda, a government minister told Reuters on Monday. "We are really upbeat on the prospect of tripling the yield of Aus (rainy season rice), for which we have collected 5.0 tonnes of high-yielding seeds from the African country," Food and Disaster Management Minister Muhammad Abdur Razzaque said.
Bangladesh currently produces around 1.5 million tonnes of Aus rice annually, far less than the Boro and Aman varieties that together come to more than 30 million tonnes a year. The agrarian nation of more than 150 million people was looking at all options to ensure food security, on the back of global spike in grain prices and short supplies, Razzaque said.
He said the government was considering other incentives for farmers including giving 40 kilograms of fertiliser free to each of about 500,000 small and medium farmers cultivating Aus. The government has offered cash subsidy to farmers and drastically cut diesel prices to help irrigation of crop fields. It is making hefty imports of rice and wheat, the main staples, in the year to June 2011 to boost food reserves, but food prices remain high. Officials at the department of agriculture extension said the high-yielding seed imported from Uganda was drought-tolerant and required less water to grow.
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