Produce grown under Good Agricultural Practices (GAP) is now coming straight from the field to the farmers market on Manik Mia Avenue in Dhaka. On Friday the Hortex Foundation, under the agriculture ministry's PARTNER project, launched the marketing and branding of Bangladesh GAP-certified produce. The first items are bananas, papayas, bottle gourds, tomatoes and snake gourds.
Md Sanowar Hossain of Mohishmara village in Madhupur, Tangail, farms this way. Safe food, he says, simply means giving the crop what it needs, when it needs it, in the right amount. Following GAP with help from the PARTNER programme has lowered his production costs, and selling directly to the market has raised his profit.
Produce from Tilottoma Organic Farm in Gazipur is also on sale. Mitul Kumar Saha, joint director of the Hortex Foundation, said joint ventures have been set up with Hanai Foodspro Limited for safe bananas and with Tilottoma Organic Farm and Sanwar Agro Farm for pineapples, papayas, tomatoes, bottle gourds and snake gourds.
The programme was opened by S M Ansaruzzaman, joint secretary at the agriculture ministry and managing director of the Hortex Foundation. He said the emphasis is on growing crops with soil, water, the environment and human health in mind, so that safe food from nature-based farming reaches more people.
The organisers say the produce will be on sale every Friday from 7am until the afternoon, at no extra cost to farmers. For growers, it means a route to consumers for safe produce, not just a way of growing it.
The report is from Samakal's agriculture pages.
Photo: NahidSultan / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)
Source: Samakal
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