Govt turns to the international marketplace for rice
The federal government has started buying rice from the international market in its effort to replenish public food stocks and increase its capacity to intervene on the market to curb a price spike of the staple food.
Within the move, the Directorate of Food floated a tender on Sunday to get 50,000 tonnes of parboiled rice from the overseas market.
It is likely to seek bids for another 50,000 tonnes quickly, said Director General Sarwar Mahmud.
"We will gradually buy things based on our procurements from the domestic market and the entire market circumstances," he stated over the phone.
The approach comes as the Directorate of Food cannot attain its purchase target for paddy and rice from winter crop Boro.
This stemmed from too little interest of farmers and millers amidst soaring prices resulting from apprehensions of reduced yield for bad weather, recurrent floods and pandemic-induced fears of food shortages.
The food ministry was able to materialise 67 % of its plan to purchase 11.5 lakh tonnes of rice from millers.
As for its purchase aim for of 8 lakh tonnes from the harvest of Boro, just over one-fourth of it's been attained. Boro makes up about over half of the twelve-monthly rice basket of 3.66 crore tonnes.
As the distribution of foodgrains continued under various programmes, including social safeness nets, stocks of rice and wheat dipped 40 % year-on-season to 8.8 lakh tonnes early this week.
The existing stock is practically half of the comfortable degree of over 15 lakh tonnes, which provides the federal government with the flexibility to intervene with open industry sales and other schemes.
The interventions seek to attain the staple to the indegent and low-income persons at lower-than-industry prices and curb price spirals.
The common retail price of coarse rice was 24 per cent higher, each kilogramme costing Tk 46.5, yesterday found in Dhaka from that a year ago, shows market data published by the Trading Corporation of Bangladesh.
So that you can refill general public storages, the meals and agriculture ministers earlier spoke out of ideas to import several lakh tonnes of rice.
Mahmud said his workplace did not fix any target to make buys from the international industry. "We will make a decision by observing, taking into consideration the overall situation," he said.
Officially, the Directorate of Food planned to start buying paddy from farmers from November 7, and rice from millers from November 15 during the current harvest season of Aman.
Although purchase of paddy has started, the volume of grain bought is, till date, insignificant while contracts with millers for the purchase of rice are yet to be finalised, said Mahmud.
The government comes with an allocation to import 1 lakh tonnes of rice during the current fiscal of 2020-21.
