Position Paper of Bangladesh in Mun

The People's Republic of Bangladesh is grateful and honored to has been given the opportunity to participate in this session within the Economic and Social Council. Bangladesh hopes to contribute significantly to the debate and to cooperate fruitfully with other delegates.

Bangladesh is the seventh most populated and arguably the most disaster-prone country in the world. Since its independence in 1971, it has experienced over 200 natural calamities causing 500,000 deaths and inhibiting economic and social development. The impact of these disasters has compounded and been exacerbated by the extremely high incidence of poverty.

Despite all of the difficulties, Bangladesh Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina has been successfully implementing a new economic model. This model aims to ensure food security by increasing productivity by providing subsidies to agricultural inputs. Bangladesh, until now considered as a 'bottomless basket case', is now a model for economic development achieving most of the MDG goals in spite of resource constraints, climate change, energy crises, over population and global crises. The poverty level has been reduced from 59% to 32%.

Furthermore, the Ministry of Agriculture is working to develop the agricultural sector of Bangladesh through numerous projects and agencies. This ministry addresses to the highest number of stakeholders in the country. The business scope ranges from crop development to agro-based industries with research on agriculture, agricultural engineering and agro-economics. This grand success has mainly been initiated by the farmers and their use of modern technologies developed by research organizations and effective Agricultural Extension Services of the Department of Agricultural Extension.

The People's Republic of Bangladesh pursues a moderate foreign policy that relies on multinational diplomacy, especially with the United Nations. Bangladesh expresses its attachment to the "Multi-year programme of work of the Economic and Social council for the period 2012-2014", in particular to promote productive capacity, employment and decent work to eradicate poverty in the context of inclusive, sustainable and equitable economic growth at all levels in order to achieve the Millenium Development Goals.

The People's Republic of Bangladesh insists that the Economic and Social Council take the leading role in promoting agricultural development and in ensuring food security. Bangladesh strongly believes that ECOSOC could come up with the strategy to help to improve the present situation. One cannot forget that the famine problem is precisely related to an increase of the world's population - and that is where we should start, from the very beginning - which means by implementing reasonable demographic policy. Moreover, the rules of the international market should be reconsidered, seeing that they create unfavorable conditions for developing