Urea Super Granule (USG) as Key Conductor in Agricultural Productivity Development in Bangladesh

Abstract

The deep placement of large urea granules (known as Guti urea in Bangladesh) into puddle enhances the soil's nitrogen absorption capacity. It helps nitrogen to stay close to the roots of paddy plants, preventing urea from being washed away by rains or floods. Urea Super Granule (USG) technology is cost effective and environment friendly. Ministry of Agriculture (MoA) with technical assistance from the International Fertilizer Development Center (IFDC) has been implementing the Guti Urea Technology Extension Project in the country since November 2007. Study says, cultivated lands using Guti urea get three times better result than the lands cultivated by urea sprayed by hand in the traditional method and earn good amount of profit and normal fertility of the land may shrink faster with the use of Guti urea instead of using organic compost fertilizer. This technology is not new in Bangladesh now but due to some gaps i.e., lack of proper marketing and demonstration, subsidy in fertilizer (especially to promote USG), less availability of user friendly Urea Deep Placement (UDP) applicator and communication gap between farmers and officials became some major constraints. In this study, author tried to focus on total scenario of Bangladesh agriculture highlighting UDP technology as productive agricultural input. Comparing with field survey data and it has been found that the technology not yet been popular to the farmers due to some technical problems like high labor cost, time consuming and difficult application process. To solve these problems it is suggested that, necessity of active marketing to spread the technology to the farmers is very important, also create more demonstration project, available supply of USG, active co-operation from fertilizer dealers can be a major support to achieve this technology as successful.

Keywords: Bangladesh, USG, FDP, UDP, Agricultural Policy, Agriculture