Carpe Diem!

As I have said in one of my earlier posts, this COVID-19 is God sent for Bhutan and it is a crisis that Bhutan must not allow to go to waste. And signs are aplenty that we are indeed seizing the opportunity - to turnaround a potential calamity into an occasion for opportunity.

Because of the virtual lock-down and the possibility of food shortages in the coming months, encouraging reports are filtering in that people across the country – urban youth, farmers, the bureaucracy, government agencies, agro-entrepreneurs, youth groups, agriculture cooperatives - are now solely focused on farm work and food production.

I believe that in the next 3-4 months Bhutan is all set for bumper food production. And I believe that we absolutely have the consumptive capacity to consume them all, within the country. We do not need export market. The question now is:

What are the government’s plans to complement the farmers’ new found initiative and vigor? Is the government machinery organized in a way that they can help the farmers with a reasonable support price (not buy-back price), transportation, distribution, delivery and storage? What are the government’s plans to ensure that the farmers produce do not go to waste for want of better storage facility, transportation, marketing and delivery network?

I believe that with a better and timely planning transportation, distribution and marketing may not be a challenge given that we have more than adequate home market for whatever the farmers produce. But the challenge would be, in my view, if the government were to be unprepared in creating adequate storage capacity.

What are the government’s plans on setting up regional cold storage facilities to stock food that cannot be absorbed by the market at one go. What are the government’s plans on post-harvest processing – in a situation when storage facilities become unobtainable?

For the past one month and for the next few months, thousands upon thousands of students are/will be home bound - resulting in billions of Ngulturms in savings, through suspension of school-feeding program. We could use this savings from the education sector – to build, on a war footing, cold storage facilities across the country, so that the food produced by the farmers and growers could be stored and released depending on market off-take.

Should the government be ill prepared to take on the anticipated mass production of food, the farmers will fall back to the same apathy that has contributed to falling farm production over the decades. The government must do all it takes to ensure that the farmers do not loose the new found momentum.