The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) and the government of Bangladesh on Thursday hosted a high-level technical workshop in the city to lay the groundwork for a new portfolio of technical support aimed at accelerating the country’s agricultural sector transformation.
This policy support leverages analytics from FAO’s Monitoring and Analysing Food and Agricultural Policies (MAFAP) programme to compile and monitor public expenditure in the food and agriculture sector and find ways to optimise such spending to accelerate Bangladesh’s agricultural transformation programme (ATP).
The two-day workshop brought together government officials, policymakers and technical experts to share the preliminary findings of an analysis on public expenditure in Bangladesh's food and agriculture sector.
Using these data-driven insights, the MAFAP programme will partner with the Ministry of Agriculture, the Bangladesh Agricultural Research Council (BARC), and other relevant institutions to track whether future spending aligns with the ATP pillars.
Secretary of the Ministry of Agriculture Dr Mohammad Emdad Ullah Mian and FAO Representative in Bangladesh Jiaoqun Shi were present at the workshop.
Dr Emdad said as they navigate the complexities of evolving global challenges—climate change, economic shocks, trade disruptions and technological transformations—effective policy monitoring and analysis have become critical.
“FAO has been a longstanding and trusted partner of the Government of Bangladesh. They will collaborate in identifying ways on how public expenditures and investments can be optimised in the framework of the agricultural transformation that will empower farmers, enhance food security and drive sustainable agricultural development," he added.
He emphasised the MAFAP programme’s data-driven approach and renowned analytical methodology, which would help “ensure whether our policies are effective and sustainable or not”, adding that its policy analysis would be “invaluable”.
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Jiaoqun Shi said FAO remains committed to supporting the government of Bangladesh in strengthening its policy frameworks for the sustainable agricultural sector.
He highlighted that the MAFAP programme can “play a pivotal role, offering a structured approach to assessing the effectiveness of food and agricultural policies and ensuring they are aligned with national development priorities”.
The workshop also includes a demonstration of the FAO’s Policy Optimization Modelling Tool (PolOpT) and how it could help the government of Bangladesh maximise the impact of its food and agriculture spending.
By optimising the way in which existing budgetary resources are allocated across different policy support measures and subsectors with PolOpT, Bangladesh could stand to boost agrifood GDP, create more off-farm jobs in rural areas, lift more people out of poverty, and make healthy diets more affordable for all.
Deputy Director for Agrifood Economics and Policy at FAO and head of the MAFAP programme Dr Marco V. Sánchez said they are all on the same page here in Dhaka; that they need to not only monitor public spending on food and agriculture to track trends, but go a step further to optimize this government spending, so that every taka is spent more effectively for more jobs, higher agrifood output growth, less poverty and more affordable healthy diets for the people of Bangladesh.
“This would be a pivotal step in Bangladesh’s agricultural transformation and the agrifood sector’s contribution to the rest of the economy, and FAO stands ready to support the government to make that happen,” he added.
Experts also saw how the tool will help Bangladesh to prioritize high-potential commodities for greatest socioeconomic impact by strategically allocating spending levels on areas such as extension services, fertilizers, irrigation, mechanization, R&D, and seeds, FAO said in a media release on Thursday.
During the workshop, stakeholders are going over preliminary results of MAFAP’s food and agriculture expenditure analysis and are actively participating in validating data with a view to fine-tuning key information to develop the policy analysis and prospective scenarios with PolOpT.