DHAKA, Nov 25 (Reuters) - Bangladesh began buying 200,000 tonnes of rice and paddy from local farmers on Tuesday to boost emergency food stocks to 3 million tonnes in the fiscal year to June 2009, officials said.
"The procurement will continue until end of February to collect 125,000 tonnes of rice and 75,000 tonnes of paddy," Molla Waheduzzaman, secretary of the Food and Disaster management ministry, told reporters.
The procurement price has been fixed at 26 taka and 16 taka for a kg of rice and paddy respectively, nearly equal to the existing retail prices across the country, he said.

The drive was launched after the country harvested some 13 million tonnes of aman paddy late last month, 34 percent more than in 2007.

The government also procured some 1.16 million tonnes of rice after the country harvested 17.6 million tonnes of boro paddy by the middle of the current year, another senior official said.

The boro production was some 17 percent higher than the previous year and the procurement helped raise the emergency food stocks to nearly 1.22 million tonnes in October.

The previous emergency food stocks were around 1.2 million tonnes in 2007, but the stocks were depleted after two floods and Cyclone Sidr killed 4,500 people and destroyed about 3 million tonnes of food crops last year.

Bangladesh also procures wheat from local production and through foreign aid, but officials could not quantify the country's wheat stock.

Out of the targeted emergency stocks, the authorities aim to distribute about 2.4 million tonnes in the 2008-09 fiscal year under its disaster management programme.

 

The country needs 30 million tonnes of rice annually to feed its population of more than 140 million. Production of food grains in the 2007/08 fiscal year was 29.77 million tonnes.

Bangladesh spent more than $800 million to import rice to meet the local shortfall caused by natural disasters in the 2007-08 fiscal year. (Reporting by Nizam Ahmed; editing by Sue Thomas)