The New Nation - Internet Edition

Staff Reporter

The negotiations between the Government and the World Bank on a US 62.6 million dollars interest-free credit from the International Development Association for the agriculture sector successfully completed yesterday, official sources said.

According to plan, the loan from the multilateral donor agency's soft-lending window is aimed at increasing agricultural productivity and farm incomes by improving the performance of the national agriculture-technology system.

Additional Secretary of Economic Relations Division Shahidul Haque and World Bank (WB) task team leader Paul Sidhu led the Government and the IDA delegations respectively at the two-day negotiations that began in Dhaka on Monday.

The estimated cost of the project is US 84.6 million dollars, of which the IDA will provide US 62.6 million dollars. The credit has 40 years to maturity with a 10-year grace period, and it carries a service charge of 0.75 per cent only.

Another amount of US 19.4 million dollars will come from the International

Fund for Agriculture Development (IFAD) while the Government's own contribution will be US 2.6 million dollars.

"The World Bank intends to use Adaptable Programme Lending (APL) to support this Government initiative. APL is a flexible instrument with long-term approach and will be used for next 15 years in three phases and each phase will be of five- year duration with clearly defined performance targets," says a WB release on the credit.

The proposed National Agriculture Technology Project (NATP) is designed to promote the generation, dissemination, adoption and use of appropriate agricultural technologies through a number of policy reforms, institutional development and investment to support agricultural research, extension and supply-chain development.

The NATP will have three components-agriculture research support, agriculture extension support and development of supply chains. The idea of linking research, extension, farmers and market would remain the central focus of this proposed programme.

Under agriculture research support, the Government will operationalise an autonomous Krishi Gobeshana Foundation (Agriculture Research Foundation) to manage the Competitive Grants Program to undertake problem-solving cross-cutting agricultural research on selected priority themes in a pluralistic framework. It also aims to enhance institutional efficiency of the Bangladesh Agricultural Research Council (BARC) and agriculture research institutes.

Decentralisations of extension service, strengthening research-extension-farmer linkages are envisaged under the agriculture-extension support component. The development of supply chains will focus on strengthening farmer-market linkages, knowledge management and human resources development.