U.N. food body urges Bangladesh to cut cheap groceries for privileged

September 15, 2000
Web posted at: 10:52 PM HKT (1452 GMT)

DHAKA, Bangladesh (Reuters) -- Bangladesh should stop giving virtually free food to civil servants, including members of the military, to allow millions of poor people more access to supplies, a senior U.N. food official said on Friday.

"Why does the government have to give food to people getting salaries from the government...like the military and other groups?" said Werner Kiene, chief delegate of the World Food Programme (WFP) in Bangladesh.

"The military needs to be paid good salaries but the use of food is not appropriate... They should get other sources of income," Kiene told Reuters in an interview.

"Food is a special development instrument which should not be used or abused for other purposes," he said.

Members of the armed forces, police and auxiliary security men pay just a token price for food such as rice, wheat, edible oil and sugar, during their service and after retirement.

"We are asking for a realignment of the food management, giving the extreme poor a bigger access to food," Kiene said.

Bangladesh was now producing more food grains than it required, he said.

The country needed 21.68 million tonnes of food to feed its 125 million and its gross domestic food production had risen by more than 70 percent over the last 20 years to 25.7 million tonnes in 1999/2000 (July-June) from about 15 million tonnes in 1980/1981, he said.

"Still, half of the country's population live in poverty, of whom 30 million are ultra poor," he said.

Kiene defined a state of poverty as consumption of less than 2,100 calories a day, and ultra poor as intake of less than 1,800 calories a day.

"Bangladesh has now achieved a much more secured food supply situation. Therefore, the time has come to bridge the (food) access gap," he said.

"We say go away from using food as a budgetary instrument or as salary supplement, but use the food for the poorest people and development," Kiene said.

Kiene said Bangladesh should keep producing more food and should also accept overseas food aid to face the most immediate challenge of bridging the access gap and implementing its development plans.

"I believe Bangladesh can make it possible because it has one of the world's best public food distribution networks," he said.

He said the WFP would offer Bangladesh food aid worth $200 million over the next five years.

The WFP provided around 150,000 tonnes of food aid annually in the past three years. It also gave 375,000 tonnes of food grains in 1998 after floods destroyed more than three million tonnes of rice in the field.

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