Causation Between Gross Investment and Agricultural Productivity: A Fresh Insight From Bangladesh

Introduction

Agriculture sector is contributing Bangladesh economy by providing employment and supplying raw materials to industrial sector. According to World Bank estimates, the agriculture sector of the country employees 38.3% of total employment in 2019, significantly decreasing this share of employment in every year as it was 47.31% in 2010. However, the continuous growth of agricultural production is accompanied by the technological changes through increasing land and labor productivity, and applying multiple high-yield cropping strategies. Due to rise in productivity of labor, agriculture sector releases a significant number of labours every year for industries or service sectors (Taslim & Taslim, 2018). The gradual increase in agricultural productivity and the spread of non-farm activities help to decline rural poverty. But due to subsistence motive and lack of policy regime of agri-farming (specifically lack of priority investment in agriculture) in Bangladesh, agricultural growth has failed to accelerate the structural shift and thereby, declining farm wage (Miah, 2020). Major challenges are appropriate technologies for unfavorable environments, particularly for the flood-prone and coastal areas, shifting the yield ceiling for irrigated lands, and devising appropriate crop and natural resource management practices that would mitigate adverse ecological consequences of intensification of the rice cultivation system (Rahman, 2017; Hossain, 2010). Moreover, most of the farmers in Bangladesh are small and marginal farmers with strictly limited factors of production (Jaim, 2019).