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Seasonality of Foodgrain Price and Procurement Programme in Bangladesh Since Liberation : An Exploratory Study

Nuimuddin Chowdhury

 

Abstract

The paper is an attempt to describe the emerging pattern of seasonality in foodgrain prices, especially those of coarse rice, in Bangladesh in the 1979s and 1980s, as also to establish some of the more important factors which may explain the former. It is found that seasonal spreads in wholesale prices of rice and wheat have steadily declined through the 1970s and, for wheat, into the 1980’s. The compression of the seasonal spreads is found to be very conspicuously due to an elevation—to the extent of 8 to 10 percentage points—of the belly of the price curve and, to a comparatively smaller extent, due to a lowering of the seasonal peaks. Second, foodgrain procurement programme and the decentralized location of mechanized ricemilling capacity have contributed to the raising of seasonal price floor. Since at any rate wholesale prices (which we have used) and grower prices are bound to display very high degrees of correlation, it stands to reason to say that procurement programme has succeeded in raising growers prices in the small number of districts and months that are really decisive in determining the countrywide price level. In assessing the effectiveness of procurement programme one had better not use annual ratios between growers-to-procurement prices, but use monthly ratios. Computing monthly growers-to-procurement prices engenders a different view of the efficacy of the procurement programme than when annual ratios are used. Our disaggregated examination sustains the thesis that procurement programme has raised the growers-to-procurement price ratios quite conspicuously in harvest months. Hence we posit that the performance of the procurement programme explains a good deal of the elevation of the bottom of the seasonal price movement, and that therefore it sheds critical light on the causes of evolving price seasonality of foodgrains in Bangladesh. This conclusion can be made quite irrespective of whether one looks at current or trend grower-to-procurement price ratios.

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