Release number IFAD/04/08

Rome, 22 January 2008 – A new project will work to boost agricultural productivity and farmers’ incomes in Bangladesh by improving the quality and responsiveness of national research and extension services.

The US$84.6 million National Agricultural Technology Project will be partly financed with a loan of US$19.5 million from IFAD. The loan agreement was signed today by Bangladesh’s Ambassador to Italy, Fazlul Karim, and IFAD’s President, Lennart Båge.

The World Bank will cofinance the project with US$62.5 million and the Government of Bangladesh will contribute US$2.6 million.

“The overall objective is to support the government’s strategy to increase national agricultural productivity and farm income,” said Nigel Brett, IFAD’s country programme manager for Bangladesh.

A number of factors contribute to the poverty of farming communities in Bangladesh. One of the most important is the lack of improved pro-poor technologies. The country’s weak research and extension services are currently unable to generate and deliver such technologies to farming communities.

“The project will work to improve the quality and responsiveness of national research and extension services,” said Brett. “It will make them more demand-driven and more appropriate to the needs of small and marginal farmers.”

Participants from groups of crop, livestock and fish farmers at the village or union level will identify research priorities and help plan and implement extension activities. These groups will also help develop value chains to strengthen farmers’ links with markets. The project will run workshops, hold on-farm demonstrations, and give training in production and entrepreneurship.

Some 330,000 households, or about 1.7 million smallholders and marginal farmers will take part in the project. About 25 per cent of the country will be covered through the extension component. In addition, intensification and diversification of production systems and support for value chain development will indirectly benefit extremely poor, landless people, through increased demand for labour.

The project’s main results will be an increase in agricultural production, diversification and farm incomes. It will also create job opportunities, strengthen women’s participation in agriculture and improve food security and nutrition.

The project has a major policy reform agenda, which includes amending the Bangladesh Agricultural Research Council Act 1996. It will also establish an autonomous agricultural research institution, the Krishi Gobeshona Foundation, and decentralize agricultural extension funding, planning and services to the upazila (sub-district)level. The project will also work with the government to update its agricultural and fisheries extension policies, and prepare a new national livestock extension policy.

“Several things in the project design are genuinely new to Bangladesh,” said Brett. “In particular, the approach to funding agricultural research through an autonomous foundation has not been tried before. This will enable a variety of public and private organizations to fund a wide range of agricultural research proposals. Also, the project approach to agricultural extension through micro-level planning and budgeting at union and upazila level has not been tried before in Bangladesh.”

With this project, IFAD has financed 25 programmes and projects in Bangladesh, investing a total of about US$443 million.

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IFAD was created 30 years ago to tackle rural poverty, a key consequence of the droughts and famines of the early 1970s. Since 1978, IFAD has invested almost US$10 billion in low-interest loans and grants that have helped more than 300 million very poor rural women and men increase their incomes and provide for their families.

IFAD is an international financial institution and a specialized United Nations agency. It is a global partnership of OECD, OPEC and other developing countries. Today, IFAD supports more than 200 programmes and projects in 84 developing countries.