[🇧🇩] Agriculture in Bangladesh

[Saif]

What's keeping Bangladesh from becoming an agricultural export hub

We all want safe food and agricultural products. Consumers want to know what they are eating and where it comes from.

www.thedailystar.net

What's keeping Bangladesh from becoming an agricultural export hub

Ahmed Rifat Kabir Sristy

'Bangladeshi agricultural products are regularly rejected for pesticide residue, pest contamination, and inadequate traceability.' File photo: Star

We all want safe food and agricultural products. Consumers want to know what they are eating and where it comes from. And policymakers, at least in principle, want Bangladesh to supply safe products. What we lack, however, is the specific, unglamorous institutional work that such an ambition requires.

Currently, Bangladesh ranks among the world’s top producers of at least 22 agricultural products and has European Union (EU) permission to export fish and fishery products. Yet agricultural exports fell by more than 1 percent year on year and earned $975 million in FY2025-26, which is close to 2 percent of the country’s merchandise earnings. Therefore, even though our production base is large, the trade is not. Vegetables show the pattern most clearly. Exports earned $88.88 million in FY2025-26, up almost 10 percent on the year, but short of the $103.24 million the sector earned a decade earlier in FY2014-15. Production and domestic consumption both expanded sharply over those 10 years but export earnings did not.

The EU keeps Bangladesh under increased official control, and according to its January 2026 update, it increased the frequency of physical checks on Bangladeshi seed and bean shipments over concerns about pesticide residues. At the same time, it eased controls on Indian okra and rice due to improved compliance. Bangladeshi shipments are regularly rejected for pesticide residue, pest contamination, and inadequate traceability. Safe agricultural products require a production system that consistently delivers on those three counts. Bangladesh does not yet have that production system.

The most widely accepted signal of safe production is Good Agricultural Practice (GAP). We already run regular GAP training programmes across hundreds of upazilas—proving that the true bottleneck lies elsewhere. Farmers adopt GAP through donor-funded interventions. When it has to be self-financed, the economics do not work, because buyers rarely pay a premium for GAP-certified produce. This is a failure of market structure, not awareness.

The most direct fix is domestic consumer activation. Right now, GAP exists almost exclusively as an export instrument, and the domestic market is untouched. When a simple milk purity testing tool was made accessible to ordinary consumers a few years ago, sellers who adulterated milk faced reputational consequences and changed behaviour. The incentive architecture shifted because transparency shifted first. A premium verification label backed by batch-level testing results accessible via QR verification would create the demand-side pull that no export promotion scheme has so far generated.

The second constraint is institutional fragmentation. Sanitary and Phytosanitary (SPS) regulation is distributed across several bodies, including the Ministry of Agriculture, the Ministry of Food, the Ministry of Fisheries and Livestock, the Bangladesh Food Safety Authority, the Plant Quarantine Wing, and the Bangladesh Standards and Testing Institution (BSTI). Each governs a slice of the compliance chain, but none has overall authority. Successive SPS capacity assessments have flagged the absence of a lead coordinating body. Because trained quarantine officers are routinely rotated out of their postings, the system constantly bleeds institutional memory. A coordination body with real authority to resolve disputes and unify inspection standards is no longer a structural luxury, but rather a prerequisite.

Third, the geography of testing is wrong. Premium horticulture products are funnelled through a central packing house in Dhaka’s Shyampur and tested there, after travelling from major horticulture zones like Rajshahi or Chapainawabganj.

Decentralised testing at origin, through satellite facilities in the main export zones of the north, would catch problems earlier, reduce post-harvest losses, and put data in the hands of exporters before the produce leaves the farm.

Fourth, Bangladesh’s digital traceability infrastructure is fragmented across incompatible donor-funded platforms. While Bangladesh is registered with the IPPC’s ePhyto network, it cannot utilise it. The centralised domestic platform needed to plug into that global system has been stalled for over a decade, leaving our digital traceability completely fractured.

Fifth, the certification architecture for safe origin needs to be built from the ground up. Under the International Plant Protection Standard (ISPM) 10, individual farms can be registered as pest-free places of production, the building blocks for eventual area-level recognition. The north-western mango belt and vegetable zones in Narsingdi could begin this now.

What is missing is a national zoning study that maps which districts can credibly claim low pest prevalence for which crops.

The production base, the diaspora market connections, and the proximity to high-value markets in the Middle East and Southeast Asia are genuine advantages. What is not yet real is the institutional infrastructure that translates all of that into trusted, safe-origin supply. Bangladesh can be a regional hub. But that status must be built, inspection point by inspection point, coordination body by coordination body, across a decade of choices.

Ahmed Rifat Kabir Sristy is coordinator at Trade Facilitation at Swisscontact Bangladesh.​

 

[Saif]

Fertiliser in stock, but shortage in field

Bangladesh may have enough fertilisers in its warehouses, but that does not necessarily mean farmers get those when they need. This seemingly simple distinction lies at the heart of the disruption now being reported from several parts of the country during the Aman season. At the national level, th

thefinancialexpress.com.bd

Fertiliser in stock, but shortage in field

Four traders fined, jailed for stockpiling fertilizer in Natore

Bangladesh may have enough fertilisers in its warehouses, but that does not necessarily mean farmers get those when they need. This seemingly simple distinction lies at the heart of the disruption now being reported from several parts of the country during the Aman season. At the national level, the government says stocks are adequate. Yet in some districts farmers are struggling to obtain fertiliser from authorised dealers at government-fixed prices, while mobile courts are uncovering overpricing, unauthorised sales and illegal stockpiling.

The paradox deserves more attention than a simple declaration that there is "no fertiliser crisis". For a farmer, a sack of fertiliser sitting in a government warehouse hundreds of kilometres away is of little practical value if it cannot reach his field at the right time and at the right price. Agricultural supply is ultimately judged not by the volume stored nationally, but by whether the input reaches farmers when the crop needs it.

The Ministry of Agriculture maintains that there is no nationwide shortage and that existing stocks are sufficient to meet demand through December. Imports under government-to-government arrangements are continuing, while private-sector importers have also been authorised to bring in fertiliser. In other words, the country does not appear to be facing a fundamental supply deficit.

But the reports emerging from the field tell a more complicated story. In Bogura, the authorities reportedly seized 1,675 sacks of fertiliser, each weighing 50 kilograms, and sealed a warehouse. Elsewhere, mobile courts have taken action against traders accused of charging more than the government-fixed prices, failing to display price lists and selling fertiliser without proper registration. Farmers in some areas have reportedly been compelled to turn to retailers after failing to obtain supplies from the authorised dealers.

These are not merely enforcement issues. They point to weaknesses in the distribution chain. Agriculture Secretary Md Selim Khan has said monitoring committees headed by two secretaries have been formed, while tag officers have been appointed in every district. Action has also reportedly been taken against officials and employees involved in irregularities, with several officials removed. He has attributed part of the disruption to uncertainty surrounding the government's new fertiliser dealer policy and suggested that some vested interests may be attempting to create a crisis to frustrate its implementation.

The new policy itself is intended to address a longstanding problem. The government plans to appoint an additional fertiliser dealer in every union while retaining the existing two, thereby widening the distribution network and reducing farmers' dependence on a small number of dealers. If implemented properly, the measure could make access easier and competition among dealers healthier.

Yet a change in policy can also create uncertainty, particularly when an old distribution arrangement is being dismantled before the new one becomes fully operational. Such a transition demands exceptionally close monitoring because fertiliser is not an ordinary commodity. Its usefulness is highly time-sensitive.

Much of the Aman cultivation has already been completed, meaning that demand for non-urea fertilisers such as DAP and MOP should be relatively limited at this stage. Farmers' immediate requirement is mainly urea. Uneven rainfall and distribution problems may nevertheless have contributed to local shortages.

With the Rabi season approaching in mid-October, farmers will soon prepare for potatoes, vegetables, mustard, maize and wheat. Fear of future scarcity may therefore be encouraging some farmers to purchase DAP and TSP earlier than necessary. Once such precautionary buying begins, it can become self-reinforcing. Farmers buy because they fear a shortage; their buying increases demand; the increased demand creates pressure in some markets; and that pressure reinforces the original fear.

Bangladesh Fertiliser Association Chairman Mosharaf Hossain has attributed the current pressure partly to panic buying and misinformation. Even a modest two-to-five per cent increase in demand, he argues, can create pressure in a particular locality. He has also pointed to the possibility of unlicensed traders buying and storing fertiliser in anticipation of higher prices.

Agricultural planning cannot be entirely statistical. It must also be responsive. A national stock figure can conceal a local shortage just as easily as an abundant harvest can coexist with food insecurity in a particular locality.

Government raids and punitive measures are necessary, but they are essentially remedial. What is needed is a distribution system in which such intervention becomes less necessary in the first place. Stocks should be monitored not merely in aggregate but geographically; allocations adjusted quickly in response to emerging demand; dealer inventories transparent; prices displayed and enforced; and farmers should have reliable alternatives when an authorised dealer fails to supply them.

There is also a larger question of trust. Farmers make decisions based not only on official data but on what they see and hear in their local markets. When a farmer is told that there is enough fertiliser in the country but cannot buy it at the official price, official assurances inevitably lose credibility.

That is why, the important question is whether the country has built a supply chain capable of delivering fertiliser where it is needed, when it is needed and at the price set by the government.

For agriculture, availability is not a warehouse statistic. It is a farmer's ability to walk into a dealer's shop and obtain the right fertiliser at the right time without paying an unofficial premium. Until that simple reality is ensured, an apparently comfortable national stock position can continue to coexist with a very real shortage in the field.​