DHAKA: Rapid urbanisation is taking a huge toll on the country’s arable land as more and more farmland is being transformed into homesteads, threatening the country’s goals of attaining food security, better health, more education and economic progress.
Divisional headquarters like Dhaka, Chittagong and Sylhet cities have doubled in both geographical area and population in the last 20 years at the cost of agricultural land and green and open spaces.
The country has lost nearly 1 million hectares of arable land in 23 years. The Bangladesh Bureau of Statistics’ data showed that the net arable land of 9.38 million hectares in 1980-1981 was reduced to 8.42 million hectares in 2002-03.
A recent survey showed that every year the country is losing more than 80,000 hectares of fertile land.
Dr Mahbub Hossain, BRAC’s executive director, said the country has to import at least 0.5 million tonnes of cereals annually to meet the growing demand for food against the backdrop of dwindling croplands.
The last BNP government’s agriculture minister, MK Anwar, a few years ago expressed his fear that after fifty years not even one bigha of land would be left for planting rice.
Food minister Dr Razzaque, at a recent seminar, admitted that the drastic reduction of farmland because of urbanisation and industrialisation, along with the adverse effects of climate change, were major barriers to achieving food security amidst.
The country had to face food shortage in 2007 because of the loss of 2 million tonnes of food-grain to two rounds of flood and cyclone Sidr, in the July-November period of that year. It had to spend an additional amount of $830 million to import rice in the 2007-08 fiscal year to meet shortfall and was forced to borrow $218 million from International Monetary Fund.
Experts and analysts observed that less employment opportunities in the rural areas are forcing more and more people to seek resettlement in the big cities.
The influx of rural people to the cities leads to further urban sprawl and loss of more arable land, and is thus posing serious threats to the country’s food security. More employment opportunities for the rural people should be created so that migration to the cities can be reduced, they suggested.
MK Mujeri, the Bangladesh Institute of Development Studies’ executive director, told New Age that there is no scope for neglecting the agricultural sector which contributes 21 per cent to the Gross Domestic Product and provides employment to around 50 per cent of total labour force.
The arable land in the greater Dhaka district comprising Dhaka, Keraniganj, Narayanganj, Gazipur, Narsingdi, Manikganj and Munshiganj is decreasing rapidly. The annual loss is no less than 7,000 hectares in the area as the BBS’s statistics showed that 4,09,130 hectares were sown in 2001-02 and only 4,02,250 hectares in 2002-03.
Greenery in the capital and adjoining towns is fading fast, thanks to growing activities of the real estate companies. The REHAB, an association of 558 real estate developers, has built 56,000 flats, most of them in Dhaka city, in the last two decades.

Conversion of arable land into plots for residences is still going on unabated on the outskirts of the capital as its population, which was only 21,72,000 in 1975, now stands at more than 13 million.
A recent visit to Keraniganj, located across the Buriganga River on the southern side of the capital, showed that nearly five square kilometres of arable and wetlands was devoured by real estate companies in less than five years’ time.
The farmland in Hasanabad, Subhadda, Ekuria, Teguria, Ainta, Peyarabagh, Kejurbagh and Parr Gandaria in Keraiganj were developed by the real estates companies, turning the once lush green villages into concrete deserts.
The same picture can be seen in Savar, Ashuliya, Gazipur and Naranyanganj where both industrialisation and urbanisation are taking place at a very fast rate.
Professor Dr Sarwar Jahan of the Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology observed that successive governments had focused only on the development of Dhaka and the major cities.
‘It is a totally wrong policy,’ said the head of BUET’s Department of Urban and Regional Planning, adding that migration, without balanced development, could not be curbed and as a result the drastic shrinking of cultivable land could not be stopped.
Professor Dr AKM Nur-un-Nabi of Dhaka University’s Science and Population Department suggested that family planning activities should be given far more importance to check population growth and save the arable land from urbanisation.
MM Akash, teacher of economics at Dhaka University, told New Age that people across the country were migrating to Dhaka in search of jobs and livelihood, which is putting huge pressure on its dwindling agricultural land.
He suggested that employment opportunities should be created in the rural areas to check the migration and further encroachment on arable land.