Agriculture Minister Dr Md Abdus Shahid urged the farmers to increase cultivation of high yielding variety potato to boost the production.

“The current varieties cultivated in our country have become very old and the yield is low. Besides, potato cultivation is decreasing due to increase in the cultivation of mustard, maize and boro paddy, resulting in shortage of potato,” he said.

“In such situation, if we can replace the low-yielding varieties with new high-yielding varieties, we will be able to produce potatoes in less land and export to other countries,” said the minister while talking to reporters after attending a view exchange meeting with the farmers at Parertong village in Sreemangal upazila.

200 metric tonnes of potatoes imported from India through Benapole port

He also visited some potato fields there.

A total of 4.56 lakh hectares of land have been brought under potato cultivation every year with production of 1.4 crore tonnes of potatoes, the minister said. On average, 23 tonnes of potatoes are produced per hectare of land.

Abir Hossain, project director of the production and preservation of quality seed potatoes and strengthening distribution at farmer level, said under this project, 14 varieties of potatoes were registered in the name of Bangladesh Agriculture Development Corporation (BADC) from the Ministry of Agriculture in the last three years to find out the potato lifespan, yield, amount of dry matter, nutritional value and suitability for cultivation in domestic weather.

Potatoes already selling at Tk25 per kg in Dinajpur as import starts through Hili

In the past four years, the government distributed 4,200 metric tonnes of sunshine varieties of potato seeds among the farmers following its huge demand and this year the government is distributing 8,000 metric tonnes of potato seeds, he said.