Editorial
Sustaining gains in social sectors
Safety net outreach through better delivery mechanism imperative
Despite successes in attaining better indicators in social sectors, Bangladesh still faces the dual challenges of ensuring food security for its ever-growing population and alleviating abject poverty.
The country's achievements in reducing child mortality, its social safety net programmes (SSNPs) to protect the most vulnerable social groups and tripling food production over a period of three decades have earned worldwide acclaim.
Understandably, increased farm investment, policy reforms and institutional support have gone into these accomplishments.
But fresh challenges from shrinking the acreages of arable lands vis-à-vis population growth and saturation of earlier agricultural methods and technology to boost production threaten to eclipse the successes. That in other words means that the danger of food insecurity still stares the nation in the face.
To overcome the challenges, the need for further modernising agricultural methods, scientific management, longer term investment in agriculture and undertaking effective population control measures have become necessary.
So far as scientific agriculture is concerned, introducing hybrid crops for higher yields and crops that can survive in hostile conditions including climate change, using biological methods to fight pests, increasing nutritional contents of the staples and diversifying the dietary habits of the people will be important. To ward off malnutrition, the people will have to be made aware about the link between agriculture, nutrition and health. At the same time, the knowledge of modern scientific methods of cultivation has to be disseminated among the farmers still hooked to age-old agricultural practices.
The competing needs and challenges further demand that the mechanisms to deliver the goods are made more efficient. As for example, the Social Safety Nets Programmes (SSNPs) to address the needs of the ultra-poor lack coordination and have leakages. These pose the threat of defeating the entire purpose of channelling the large amounts of fund from the state exchequer for those programmes. It necessitates streamlining the SSNPs to make the delivery mechanism of the benefits for the poor efficient and plugging the administrative loopholes through which the leakages occur.
In short, the major tasks before the nation will be to protect the gains so far made to ensure food security, fight poverty and prepare for the new challenges on a sustainable basis.
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