Thank you Masrur

Moving to the details of the activities (Slide 7)

Firstly, to ensure that farmers get their fair price in selling the produced crops and to remove any
type of artificial demand created by the wholesalers, the total supply chain will be handled by us.

The farmers will come to the village level warehouse with their produces and collect their
payment in return. The produces will be then checked, assembled and packaged according to
types. Next, all the produces from the village level warehouses under a upazila will be transported
to the upazila level warehouse. Here, the produces will be graded and assembled as per the
district town warehouse demand and will be transported to the wholesalers there.

Now the flow of produces from village to upazila level will be monitored and controlled according
to day-to-day demand and everything will be checked and stored in the database by the database
officer on each level.

To implement this strategy, collaborations have to be made with transportation services,

warehouse services and outlet space providers. We can also collaborate with the Department of
Agricultural Marketing to help us monitor the retail and wholesale price of the agriculture
products and identify the reasons for fluctuations in the market price.

Next Slide (Slide 8)

Here is a visual representation on how the flow of produces will move from each level.

Moving to the next slide

Next slide (Slide 9)

In order to make the farmers aware of the means of higher output, there will be a trained
professional team in each upazila who will visit the farms under their area of coverage, and
promote the high yielding input materials to the farmers. The farmers will be trained on the usage
of high yielding input materials comprising high quality seeds, fertilizers, pesticides and
equipment along with the appropriate proportion of fertilizers and pesticides to be used on a
given area of land, the farmers can also seek help from this team whenever they need by simply
contacting with the offices in the districts. This will be done in collaboration with Syngenta
foundation, which aims to benefit local farmers through improved access to agri-products,
machinery, training and know how. Collaboration will also be made with GFRAS in this regard as
they provide rural advisory services to effectively contribute to agricultural innovation systems
for sustainable development.

Also, with an aim to make the high yielding input materials and modern agri-equipment widely
available across the country, there will be 3 sales centers each district. The whole process will be
conducted in collaboration with Bangladesh Agriculture Development Corporation (BADC) which
is responsible for procuring and producing high yielding input materials. We can collaborate with
USAID as they have working on increasing access to such materials for the farmers of the country.

Moving to the next slide

Next Slide (Slide 10)

To promote high yielding input materials and equipment to the farmers and potential
entrepreneurs, there will be a team under each district to arrange Agri-fairs and floating shops.
To implement this, we will need to collaborate with YPARD Bangladesh as they are involved in
participating in agricultural development events to inspire the youth in choosing agriculture-
based profession. Agriculture Information Service (AIS) can also play a prominent role here
making available of the agricultural information and technologies using print electronic and ICT
based mass media.

To make the farmers aware of any forecasted natural disaster or hazardous weather, 3
agrometeorology information center will be built in each district. The key function of these
centers will be to collect the day-to-day agrometeorology information from Bangladesh
Meteorological Department and Bangladesh Agro-Meteorological Information Portal, and then
announce the information across the villages under the upazila whenever there is a forecast of
any hazard.

Next Slide, (Slide 11)

Now let’s see the financial viability of this project. The overall cost of this 1-year project is around
1579 million Bangladeshi taka which is only 1% of the allocated budget to the agriculture sector.
We will see the breakdown of the budget in the later part of the presentation. For now, we have
collected the total production of various important crops in the selected 10 districts. As
mentioned earlier, we will be getting involved in the supply chain which means the farmers in
those regions will get to sell their products through us to the wholesalers and we will be taking
only a commission of BDT 1.5 taka per kg which is much lower than what the farmers are currently
paying to the middlemen. So, if we assume that in the first year, only 35% of the produced crops
will be sold through us, and if we take only 1.5-taka commission, the project will generate a
positive NPV of 0.35 million and an IRR of 26% which is very higher than the government risk free
treasure bond rate. The ROI of the project is 1.6 times at this rate which is also viable.

Now we can see that we have kept the commission very low for the welfare of the farmers, and

Next slide (Slide 12)

If we increase the commission to a maximum of 3.5 taka per kg on average which is still very
much affordable to the farmers, the NPV, IRR and ROI also show a much better result.

That will be all from me, Afi will be conducting the next part.