Talking to The Daily Star, officials and experts noted that Bangladesh would be in trouble in the days to come if it does not chalk out a long-term land use policy soon.

According to official statistics, Bangladesh has 8.29 million hectares of land now available for cultivation, over one million hectares less than a decade ago. Under the current rate of urbanisation, industrialisation and river erosion, the country is losing 1 percent of its arable land, or 82,900 hectares of cropland, each year.

Against this backdrop, there is no scope for any horizontal rise in crop production and the increased food production to feed the additional population must come from vertical growth in future, experts said.

With 69 percent of the total cultivable land giving two to three crops a year, Bangladesh has already become the country with the highest cropping-intensity.

Analysing the population growth pattern of Bangladesh in correlation to grains output, agronomist Dr Mahabub Hossain said despite the remarkable achievement in controlling the high birth rate, the population continues to grow by 2 million people each year because of the large existing population base.

"Interestingly, when there were 70 million people in Bangladesh in the early 70s and there was an over 3 percent annual growth rate, population used to grow by 2 million each year, and now that the growth rate has come down to 1.5 percent, 2 million people are still added to Bangladesh's population every year because of the huge size of the population base -- 140 million," explained Dr Mahabub, who heads the Social Science Division of the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI).

According to Dr NI Bhuiyan, director general of Bangladesh Rice Research Institute (BRRI), the country's population will hover around 190 million by 2030 when an extra 25 percent grains will have to be produced to feed the population. But the additional harvests will have to be reaped from a much smaller area of cropland than is now available.

According to one projection, the country would have to grow an additional five to six million tonnes of grains by 2020 in a land area two million hectares less than today. By that time the country's projected population will be around 173 million.

After attaining food self-sufficiency in 1999-2000, Bangladesh had to import around 3 million tonnes of grains in 2002-03 because of the continuing growth in demand for food.

Thanks to IRRI-BRRI initiatives in developing new varieties with extra yield potentials, over the last three decades Bangladesh has been able to increase its grains output to keep up with the population growth. But experts are worried as to whether this can be maintained in the near future with less cropland availability.

Dr Nurul Alam, executive chairman of Bangladesh Agricultural Research Council (BARC), the federating body of the National Agricultural Research System (NARS), said there is little option left for Bangladesh but to go for a vertical rise in production through pursuing agro-biotechnology and other frontier sciences. "We have to further increase the per unit crop output."

"Ad-hoc land planning will not do. Now the country needs to chalk out a long-term land use policy, maybe for 50 years," observed Dr Alam, recommending that the land ministry in league with the Soil Resources Development Institute (SRDI) under the Ministry of Agriculture could take up a plan to that effect.

To cite an example of how quickly croplands are shrinking, sources pointed fingers at Amin Bazar, Savar and beyond, just outside the capital, where brick kilns stand one after another taking away all the prime agricultural land.

As farmlands are shrinking at an astounding rate of almost one million-hectares a decade, successive governments considered land reclamation to be an effective way of facing the emerging problem of food insecurity.

Land reclamation is the process of claiming back submerged land from water bodies like oceans, seas and rivers.

Anticipating the looming danger of land scarcity, Bangladesh first approached the Dutch government for assistance in land reclamation in 1974. Dhaka again asked for support on the land reclamation issue during the 1996 food summit in Rome.

Bangladeshi scientists, while studying the satellite pictures made available by US space agency NASA during 1974, discovered that a huge landmass was emerging along its water areas in the Bay of Bengal. However, the country missed the opportunity to set up an oceanographic study centre offered by the USA, due to lack of initiative.

In an article Land Reclamation: Indo-Bangladesh Maritime Dispute, two research scholars of Jawharlal Nehru University (JNU) of India, Alok Kumar Gupta and Saswati Chanda write, "India prepared a document in the late nineties to lay claim to one million square kilometers of the Bay of Bengal and Arabian Sea. India is of the opinion that the area forms its continental shelf. If the theory is accepted, countries sharing this shelf such as Bangladesh, Myanmar, Sri Lanka, the Maldives and Pakistan would be affected, and their maritime assets would be compromised."

Experts noted that while the government has already taken land austerity measures as a stopgap arrangement, it would do better if it goes for a long-term land use policy soon. Under the land austerity scheme, the government now acquires less land for construction of administrative buildings at district and thana levels than previously.