The New Nation - Internet Edition

A.T.M.Nurun Nabi

The severe hurricane has damaged standing crops of five lakh hectares of land on last Thursday night in the Southern Bangladesh with warning that the aman production in the country during the current fiscal might be additional short of target by about 10 lakh metric tonnes. After the back-to-back floods had ravaged the country's northern part in August, experts apprehended less production of aman by five lakh metric tonnes, meaning that the aman target of 1.30 croremetric tonnes will not be achieved.

In this backdrop, government must keep its watchful eyes on the supply line of the essentials to check artificial crisis and price hike.

Howbeit, the Department of Agriculture is reportedly planning to cultivate boro in the land affected by hurricane. But experts are of the view that boro does not grow in the land submerged by saline water.

In the National Budget 2007-08, government allocated taka 2154 crore to the Ministry of Food and Disaster Management, up from taka 1450 crore in the revised budget of the previous fiscal. The allocation to the Ministry of Agriculture amounted to taka 4332 crore, Ministry of Fisheries and Livestock taka 551 crore, Ministry of Environment and Forest taka 252 crore, Ministry of Land taka 352 crore and Ministry of Water Resources taka 1411 crore.

In the Thursday hurricane, it is feared that one million cattle died, hundreds of shrimp hatcheries were affected, thousands of houses destroyed, trees uprooted, and roads and culverts damaged, needing a huge amount of money to rebuild. Though it is too early to arrive at correct statistics of economic losses, yet it can be said that the amount would not be less than taka 10,000 crore.

A former college teacher said, government might transfer fund from the less important projects in different ministries to the emergency fund for immediate starting of the reconstruction works. There is example that the past governments in no loss of time started to overcome massive losses occurred in nation wide floods in 1988, 1998 and 2004 with own resources than depending on arrival of foreign assistance.

In the past, workers of different political parties reached the savaged areas with all they had. In addition, the government had mobilised its resources. As a result, it became possible to heal the wounds quickly. As the interim government has no political workers that they would rush in aid of the affected people In this conditions, political and social workers irrespective of parties and ideology should not hesitate any more to land there to help survivors. Side by side with national reconstruction work in the south, government should keep eyes on the movement of the essentials so that none creates artificial crisis to raise the price of all the food items, rice in particular.