Bangladesh e-Journal of Sociology. Volume 8, Number 2. July 2011 4 Estimation of Population and Food Grain Production in Bangladesh by 2020: A Simple Moving Average Approach to a Time Series Analysis Dayal Talukder 1 and Love Chile 2 Abstract The study used a time series dataset for a period of 23 years to estimate and analyse the size of population, food grain production and requirements for next ten years in Bangladesh with a view to providing policy makers and government with information for policy formulation and analysis. Using a simple moving average (SMA) method, a five-year average technique is applied for smoothing observed data series to generate a linear trend for the estimation of projected values of population, food grain requirements, net food grain production and food grain balance. The results indicate that the growth of population over next ten years will be very similar to the observed period. Increase in domestic food grain production shows a higher trend than food grain requirements leading to a food grain surplus over the same period. However, the size of population is growing too large to accommodate in a small country with a very low per capita income. The growing population will put enormous pressure on available resources thereby making future development unsustainable. The study suggests that the government should formulate policies to significantly reduce population growth. Introduction Appropriate policy formulation, planning and programme implementation are keys to socio- economic development of a country. Accurate projection of data plays an important role in providing policy makers with information and analysis that are required for policy formulation, planning, programme design and implementation for maintaining a sustainable socio-economic development in future. Projections of population and food grain production are intended to be useful for farmers, governments, agribusiness industries and policy makers. This sort of projection is crucial for developing countries like Bangladesh with a large size of population, small size of land area, low per capita income, high level of poverty, persistent food shortage, prolonged dependency on foreign aid, and low productivity in food grain sector. Since its independence in 1971, Bangladesh has been considering high population growth as a number one problem for the economy. Although it strived to reduce population growth; the size of population became almost double over last three decade from 72 million in 1972 to 140 million in 2005 with an average increase by over 2 million per year (MoA 2007: Table 101). This enormous size of population living in a land of 145567 sq kilometre (with a density of over 1000 people per sq km) has posed a serious challenge for future development of the economy in following ways: putting huge pressure on environment and available resources; limiting agricultural growth and food grain production through reducing arable land for housing and non-agricultural purposes; 1 Institute of Public Policy, Auckland University of Technology, Auckland, New Zealand, corresponding author, email: dktalukder@hotmail.com or sfh2305@aut.ac.nz 2 Institute of Public Policy, Auckland University of Technology, Auckland, New Zealand, email: love.chile@aut.ac.nz