Sajjad Zohir

SAPRI-Bangladesh

After the Independence, most of the organized activities in Bangladesh economy were owned and operated by the public sector through various public agencies. Such a state of ownership was partly rooted in the past policy regimes and was partly a de facto outcome due to absence of the previous entrepreneurs and institutions. Since the late 1970’s, reforms in the food and agriculture sector were initiated to gradually limit the space of the public sector. These reforms remained at sectoral level, until being packaged under the Structural Adjustment Policies (SAP) during the second half of the 1980’s. While policy reforms continued into the 1990’s, some of the major reforms in the agricultural input markets came about in the 1980’s. Two important elements of these reforms were perceived to include, reduction of subsidy, and increasing the participation of private sector in the procurement and distribution of inputs.