Tanim Ahmed

So all the parties have pledged to ensure food security. Emerging from an especially difficult year that saw low food grain production due to natural calamities, worsened by the global financial and food crises, no surprises there. To that end the parties have promised to ensure availability of cheap inputs on one end and fair prices of the produce at the other end. Now that the election campaign is in full swing, rallies and processions feature the party symbols. So the Awami League rallies and processions with the typical Bangladeshi country boat are all too common. Same story with the Bangladesh Nationalist Party. But their symbol, the sheaf of paddy is more symbolic to food security and certainly more handy to wave around. Their choices of weapon are also fitting — the ‘oar’ versus the ‘sickle’. And as people will well remember, it was one too many skirmishes pitting the oar against the sickle that saw the military forces stage an intervention last year. Oars and sickles are still in the background and thankfully so.
But one cannot help but wonder with all those sheaves of paddy being waved about, how much paddy would it take to run a campaign for the BNP? If every supporter even wanted to have a strand of it, it would almost certainly threaten food security even before the elections have happened and a party might be blamed for having broken their pledge even before it made it to the elections! On the other hand there should be a lucrative niche market for plastic sheafs of paddy. Now there is an industry waiting to be plucked out of non-existence. One only hopes that the Jatiya Party and the Awami League does not take to carrying around their symbols—boats and ploughs—or the rural economy as we know would surely be on the verge of collapse.