THE government’s failure to give out information to farmers that they badly need has a double jeopardy in the process. While the farmers cannot receive expert suggestions tailored to their farming needs, what more harm it does is that the farmers are unknowingly getting ensnared by the agricultural input sales and marketing companies that set up help-lines where people employed by the companies give out information drawn from a set of questions and answers primarily geared to the expansion of the business of the private companies.
This failure of successive governments has only pushed the farmers to quit their traditional ways of cultivation and done almost nothing to equip the farmers with the required knowledge. The companies selling agricultural inputs have opened help-lines that are toll-free while farmers need to count Tk 0.25 a minute if the call to government agricultural information services, which are far too inadequate to cater to the need of about 18.5 million farmers. The Agricultural Information Services at the Department of Agricultural Extension headquarters runs a call centre with five agriculturists, who could attend only a half of the calls, which account for 60 calls a day on an average.
On the other front, as New Age reported on Sunday, a private company could grow its business by 30 per cent every year since it set up a helpline in the middle of 2014. Another company, which received only six calls a day in 2015, now needs to attend 250 calls a day. It has already reached more than a quarter million farmers and hoped to reach out to 2 million more by 2020.
Such a stark difference shows that something has been awry in the government information services for the farmers. It at least calls for, on part of the government, more efforts in plans to help the farmers in their farming process. What remains worrisome about this is that the help-lines of private companies, which claim to cater to the farming needs of the farmers, are, in effect, run to expand the business of the companies. When farmers call to these help-lines, they are given information and are mostly linked to specific products, leaving uninformed farmers vulnerable to manipulation of various kinds. This raises the concern for an overuse of pesticide and fertiliser, and even chemical reagents that could be harmful in more than the designated volume.
If the farmers got the information from the agricultural information services, they would not need to depend on the help-lines that are set up by private companies. By so doing, they could get expert suggestions tailored to their farming needs and would not be exposed to manipulation aimed at business expansion of private companies. The government, in such a situation, must effectively attend to the weaknesses of the system. The government must strengthen its farming information dissemination services, and that too entirely free as the private company help-lines are run, with proper logistics and human resources, to extend proper support for farmers in a meaningful way.
- Courtesy: New Age/Jan 29, 2018
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