There is enough fertiliser in stock in the country, so there will be no shortage this season, the Ministry of Agriculture has said.

According to ministry sources on Wednesday (14 August), the country currently holds 570,000 tonnes of urea, 320,000 tonnes of TSP, 390,000 tonnes of DAP and 411,000 tonnes of MoP.

Badiul Alam, deputy chief (agricultural economist) of the ministry's fertiliser management and monitoring wing, oversees the stocks. He gave Jago News the stock figures.

Urea is the fertiliser the country needs most. However, because of the gas crisis and other reasons, production has been halted for seven months at Jamuna Fertiliser Factory in Jamalpur, the country's largest and only granular urea producer. Besides domestic production, fertiliser is imported through Bangladesh Chemical Industries Corporation and the Bangladesh Agricultural Development Corporation (BADC).

Badiul Alam said that with the fertiliser now in hand there is no fear of a shortage in the current aman season, although many had feared one because of the gas crisis and the ongoing political instability.

"We are starting work on the coming boro season. With the stocks we have now, there is no worry for the time being," he said.

At the end of the rainy season, farmers are busy with aman cultivation. Early in July, floods inundated some parts of the country, and the prolonged flooding damaged agriculture, affecting aman planting. Harvesting and threshing may therefore be delayed this year.

Forty per cent of the rice produced in the country comes from the aman season. This season the target for transplanted aman was set at 5,620,000 hectares, but the target has been met, with 5,657,447 hectares planted. The production target for this land is 15,986,000 tonnes.

Source: Jagonews24. First published in Bengali on The Agro News.