Big boost for South

A huge potential of otherwise disadvantaged southern region would be unlocked in a post-Padma Bridge scenario.

Keeping this into consideration, Bangladesh's development partners are taking up programmes to unleash the full potentials of the southern farmers.

In an exclusive interview with The Daily Star at her office on Thursday, the new country representative of the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), Sue Lautze, said the UN body was providing technical assistance to an $85-million Smallholder Agricultural Competitive Project (SACP).

Once the Padma Bridge is completed, Sue said, access to market for the southern farmers would be enormous. Besides, there would be a huge potential for growing high-value horticulture and establishing agro-processing industries linking those up with southern farmers, thereby enhancing the smallholders' competitiveness, observes Sue, who has recently replaced Mike Robson as the FAO Representative.

Another Rome-based UN specialised agency, the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) along with the Bangladesh government is funding SACP to support smallholder farmers in 12 southern districts to increase their incomes and livelihood resilience through demand-driven productivity growth, crop diversification and marketing in a changing climate condition.  

Sue Lautze believes such an initiative came in good synchronisation with the government's own south-bound agricultural development plans.

The southern region of Bangladesh is generally perceived as disadvantaged in terms of frequent extreme events, poverty, food insecurity, environmental vulnerability and limited livelihood opportunities.

The agriculture ministry in league with the fisheries, livestock and water resources ministries has chalked out a 'Master Plan for Agricultural Development in the Southern Region of Bangladesh' with FAO's technical support to implement as many as 85 interventions involving Tk 57,000 crore by 2021.

The FAO Representative reckons once the bridge over the river Padma is built, the south's potential to endow the country's food basket could be fully tapped. She underscores the need for enhancing the competitiveness of the southern smallholder farmers. 

More than 40 percent work of the Padma Bridge construction has so far been accomplished.

Sue Lautze, who's immediate past duty station was in war-ravaged new nation South Sudan, praises Bangladesh's development transformation in just one generation considering the fact that like South Sudan this country has passed through the days of war, famine and helplessness.  

Sue, a PhD, served as a senior advisor in the Emergency and Rehabilitation Division at FAO headquarters in Rome. She also served as the UN's Deputy Humanitarian Coordinator in South Sudan (2014-2106) and also was FAO's Representative for South Sudan (2012-2014).

Her nearly three decades of work has focused principally on the effect of shocks on livelihood systems. A co-founder of the Feinstein International Center at Tufts University, she holds academic degrees in agriculture economics, public affairs and international development from UC Davis, Princeton and Oxford respectively. She has worked in both humanitarian and development functions in Africa, Europe and Asia.

Sue, an American national, acknowledges that Bangladesh has been losing farmland fast but "loss of arable land doesn't necessarily mean loss of arable space." She explains that she does not like to see empty rooftops. There should be gardens on all the rooftops; there should be efforts to create greeneries in urban settings.

The FAO representative observes that safe food, safe water and safe air are getting prerogatives of those who could afford those. "But that shouldn't be the case. Safe food, safe water and safe air are our rights."

With firm conviction, she further adds, "We shouldn't poison our water, we shouldn't pollute our air."

Efforts are continuing from the FAO's part to help Bangladesh's safe food authorities build an institutional capacity to check unsafe food, she observes.