Boosting rural non-farm sector will be an imperative for Bangladesh in coming years to generate employment and increase income in view of the country demographic, geographic and economic realities, says a World Bank (WB) publication.

The recent publication, titled "Transforming Bangladesh into a Middle Income Economy", has underlined the need for undertaking micro, small and medium non-farm ventures as well as turning the agriculture sector into an export-oriented one for proper marketing of farm produces, local daily New Age reported on Sunday.

In the WB publication, economists of the multilateral lending agency said the doubling of rural growth rate from 2.2 percent during the 1990s could be achieved by significantly enhancing the performances of agriculture and non-farm sectors.

A per capita rural consumption growth of at least 4 percent per annum is needed to halve rural poverty by 2015, the lender-driven poverty reduction strategy paper estimates in line with the vision under the United Nations Millennium Development Goals.

New Age quoted official statistics as saying that about 53 percent of the rural population still live in poverty and 37 percent in extreme poverty despite a 1 percent decline in rural poverty and 2.2 percent growth in rural income.

In the book's one of the articles on "Improving the Rural Investment Climate For Non-farm Enterprises", Forhad Shilpi wrote that the productivity gain in agriculture not only eliminated the threats of hunger and famine but also allowed some diversification into other high value crops, livestock and fisheries and fueled a rapid expansion of rural non-farm activities.

The author, however, pointed to shrinkage of arable lands in Bangladesh saying that agricultural land is increasingly being diverted to competing uses such as housing, roads and industrial development. The farmland declines at a rate of 1 percent a year.

Forhad Shilpi mentioned that there are nearly 1 million new entrants into the total labor force every year despite significant fall in population growth. The urban areas currently employ only 18 percent of the country's total labor force of 58 million.

"The majority of the new entrants (80 percent) will need to find a job in the rural areas," he said, adding that the labor force joining the rural non-farm sector would continue to swell in the near future, given the limited opportunity in employment expansion of agriculture.

The author stressed on micro, small and medium enterprises in Bangladesh as there are around 4.25 million enterprises in these categories and 70 percent of them are in rural areas.

Source: Xinhua