Urbanization, industrialization and river erosion are eating up crop lands at a rate of 221 hectares a day posing a serious threat to Bangladesh’s economy with experts fearing bad days ahead for the country which will need to grow more food to feed its growing population. Officials and experts said that 143,998 square km Bangladesh with 130 million people has now 8.29 million hectares of crop lands, over one million hectares fewer than a decade ago. Under the current rating of eating up of crop lands by urbanization, industrialization and river erosion, the country is losing 1 percent of its arable land or around 80,000 hectares of crop land each year.
Officials and experts fear that the country would be in serious trouble in the years ahead as the country’s population is growing at the rate of 1.5 percent. They think the government should immediately work out a long- term plan about the land use policy to tackle the problem. In the backdrop of fast depletion of crop lands, there is no scope for any horizontal increase in crop production and the rise in food production to feed the additional population must come from vertical growth in future, experts said. With 69 percent of the total cultivable land giving two or three crops a year, Bangladesh has already become the country with the highest cropping-intensity.
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