The Commerce Ministry has decided to form a special committee to evaluate the prospects of exporting sand and soil to boost export earnings.
The new idea was first discussed a couple of months ago in a meeting of the Executive Committee of the National Economic Council (Ecnec).
Sources said several enthusiastic private companies have already placed proposals to the government seeking permission for the new business. They believe that Bangladesh can earn as much as Tk700 crore – Tk1,200 crore annually in sand exports.
The latest decision to form an eight-member committee was made at an inter-ministerial meeting at the Commerce Ministry yesterday. The meeting, presided over by the new Commerce Secretary Hedayetullah Al Mamoon, discussed prospects of formulating a policy for exporting soil and sand.
The committee, headed by Commerce Ministry Joint Secretary Shawkat Ali Warsi, has been tasked with submitting a report containing recommendations on relevant permissions to be granted and the formulation of a policy, within 21 days.
However, during yesterday's meeting, officials of the mineral resources ministry opposed the idea of exporting sand, claiming that it might contain huge amounts of mineral resources.
Interestingly though, apart from conducting a survey in 1995, the mineral resources ministry has never taken any step to extract what they say were “huge amounts of mineral resources” embedded in the sand.
In response, the new commerce secretary lambasted the officials of the mineral resources ministry for never taking any steps to extract the “valuable” resources and said their objections were not based on facts. He also asked them to explain the reasoning behind their opposing the new idea.
During the meeting, representatives of the Environment Ministry said no matter what the government decided, care should be taken so that the environment was not damaged in any way.
Prof Mominul Haque Sarker, head of the government's Centre for Environment and Geographic Information Services, told the Dhaka Tribune that he was surprised to know that the mineral resources ministry, who never did anything more than conducting a survey two decades ago, had opposed the idea of exporting sand.
“The 1995 research found some heavy metal in oceanic sand. That, if extracted, could have helped. Oceanic sand does not have any mineral content of its own. Whatever it has is transported by the rivers. Therefore, riverbed sand can also be rich in mineral resources,” said Mominul, also the dean of the Environmental Sciences Faculty of the Dhaka University.
The meeting also discussed that around 1.67 billion tonnes of sand and sediment comes into the Bangladeshi rivers every year and only 30% of that reaches the Bay of Bengal; the rest settles in the river beds which can be extracted by dredging.
According to an official, the government is currently considering the prospects of exporting the riverbed sand; not sand from the sea bed or the beaches.
Secretary Hedayetul said the potential of earning foreign currency from exporting sand and soil was huge because there was a lot of demand in Asia, especially for filling up the sea for land expansion and reclamation.
“Bangladesh badly needs investments for economic development,” he told the meeting yesterday.
A private company named Network and Infrastructure Company has recently applied to the Commerce Ministry, seeking approval for exporting over 1.5 million tonnes of sand to Singapore. The application is still pending.
Since the 1960s, Singapore's land area has increased by more than 20%. Almost all of this land reclamation has been done using sand imported from nearby countries such as Indonesia and Malaysia.
The country also needs vast volumes of sand for its construction industry which has been booming over the past decade or so, according to Singaporean business portal TradeWinds.
The Maldives government has also expressed its interest to Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina regarding the import of sand from Bangladesh for land expansion.
The existing Export Policy Order of the Commerce Ministry does not contain any prohibitions to the export of sand.