\nDhaka \/\/<\/p>\n
Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina has emphasized increasing domestic production to reduce reliance on imports for agricultural and food products. She urged officials of the Ministry of Agriculture to take effective measures to boost the production of crops that have the potential to be grown domestically.<\/p>\n
On Sunday (September 13), the Prime Minister walked from her office at the Secretariat to the Ministry of Agriculture and held a meeting with officials in the conference room. During the meeting, the overall situation of the agricultural sector, the ministry’s ongoing activities, and future plans were presented.<\/p>\n
The Prime Minister stated that, alongside ensuring food security for the people, agriculture must be made more productive and profitable.<\/p>\n
Data presented by the ministry during the meeting revealed that mustard production is being increased to reduce dependency on edible oil imports. Domestic mustard production stood at 8.24 lakh tonnes in the 2021-22 fiscal year; it rose to 15.34 lakh tonnes in 2024-25 and reached 15.41 lakh tonnes in 2025-26.<\/p>\n
Initiatives to enhance onion production and storage capacity were also highlighted. Measures have been taken to utilize air-flow technology for onion storage at the farmer level and to expand the cultivation of summer onion varieties. Simultaneously, efforts are underway to disseminate new crop varieties capable of withstanding salinity, drought, and waterlogging at the field level.<\/p>\n
Highlighting progress in agricultural research, the ministry reported the development of 1,090 crop varieties, including 155 rice varieties. Information regarding the innovation of over a thousand agricultural technologies was also presented. The meeting underscored the importance of agricultural mechanization to boost productivity while reducing labor and costs. Initiatives are in place to innovate and manufacture domestic agricultural machinery and to make equipment\u2014such as combine harvesters, reapers, and rice transplanters\u2014available to farmers at affordable prices.<\/p>\n
Additionally, initiatives to expand the use of solar power in agriculture were highlighted. Discussions at the meeting highlighted that expanding renewable energy-based irrigation\u2014building upon the existing 2,617 solar irrigation systems in the country\u2014could reduce both irrigation costs for farmers and reliance on conventional fuels.<\/p>\n
The ‘Farmer Card’ program, designed to deliver government assistance directly to farmers, also received significant attention. The Ministry of Agriculture has set a target to bring 4.3 million farmers under this program by the 2026-27 fiscal year; preparations are already underway to issue cards to approximately 110,000 farmers in the initial phase.<\/p>\n
The meeting also covered topics such as agricultural mechanization, solar irrigation, canal excavation, tree plantation, and the storage and marketing of agricultural produce. The Prime Minister emphasized the need to boost agricultural productivity while simultaneously lowering production costs for farmers and ensuring fair prices for their produce.<\/p>\n
The Prime Minister stated that reliance on imports for agricultural and food products that can be produced domestically must be gradually reduced. To achieve this, greater emphasis must be placed on increasing domestic production by rapidly extending the benefits of research, improved crop varieties, modern technology, irrigation facilities, and mechanization to the farmers.<\/p>\n
Stay tuned for regular updates and share your views.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Dhaka \/\/ Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina has emphasized increasing domestic production to reduce reliance on imports for agricultural and food products. She urged officials of the Ministry of Agriculture to take effective measures to boost the production of crops that have the potential to be grown domestically. On Sunday (September 13), the Prime Minister walked from her office at the Secretariat to the Ministry of Agriculture and held a meeting with officials in the conference room. During the meeting, the overall situation of the agricultural sector, the ministry’s ongoing activities,<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":8646,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[23,22],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8645","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-national","category-top-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thedailymorningsun.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8645","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thedailymorningsun.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thedailymorningsun.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thedailymorningsun.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thedailymorningsun.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=8645"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/thedailymorningsun.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8645\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8647,"href":"https:\/\/thedailymorningsun.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8645\/revisions\/8647"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thedailymorningsun.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/8646"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thedailymorningsun.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=8645"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thedailymorningsun.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=8645"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thedailymorningsun.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=8645"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}