Govt to ship 50,000 tonnes of urea to Nepal
Bangladesh is defined to send 50,000 tonnes of it has the imported urea fertiliser to Nepal at the import value to greatly help the landlocked country, which failed to purchase the organic compound promptly because of the Covid-19 outbreak.
To materialise the program, the cabinet committee on get yesterday in its 36th conference approved the get of Tk 109.74 crore worth of granular urea fertiliser.
Bangladesh Chemical Industries Company (BCIC) would purchase the fertiliser from international jv entity Karnaphuli Fertiliser Enterprise Ltd (Kafco).
It would purchase 40,000 tonnes found in mass at $257.35 a tonne and the rest 10,000 tonnes of bagged urea fertiliser at $262 a tonne, Abu Saleh Mostafa Kamal, extra secretary of the cabinet division, told journalists after the meeting.
"Nepal would get the fertiliser at the import price tag. However, yet another $1.82 a tonne will be collected from their website as banking charge," Industry Secretary KM Ali Azam told The Daily Star.
Nepal would pay the costs through banking channel within 90 days, he added.
Throughout a telephone conversation about September 1, Nepalese Prime Minister KP Sharma Oli sought the fertiliser from his Bangladeshi counterpart Sheikh Hasina.
"Nepal requested Bangladesh to supply urea fertiliser and the federal government decided to assist," said Azam, adding that Bangladesh imports around 15 lakh tonnes of urea annually.
An agreement between your companies of both countries was signed about December 17 at the initiative of Nepalese Ministry of Agriculture and Livestock Development.
Mohammad Amin Ul Ahsan, BCIC chairman, and Netra Bahadur Bhandari, managing director of Krishi Samagri Organization of Nepal, signed the arrangement.
This is the first ever trade of fertiliser for Bangladesh with a neighbouring country, Financing Minister AHM Mustafa Kamal, who chaired the meeting through a virtual platform from Singapore, informed journalist following the meeting.
When issues were raised on the export when the country would depend on import, the minister said: "The export will brighten the country's picture."
There are cases of exporting goods after importing those by countries like Singapore and others, he said.
