[🇧🇩] Green Farming in Bangladesh

[Saif]

Date of Event: Dec 29, 2025

Source: https://www.thedailystar.net/opinion/editorial/news/green-farming-thanchi-encouraging-4067146

Green farming in Thanchi encouraging
Discourage tobacco cultivation, promote green crops

It is heartening to learn that green crops are gradually replacing tobacco cultivation in Bandarban's Thanchi upazila. Reportedly, over the past few years, farmers have moved away from tobacco and embraced environment-friendly crops such as peanuts, beans, mustard, watermelons, and seasonal vegetables along the banks of the Sangu River. This shift is improving livelihoods while also protecting the hill ecosystems. It has also been found that green crop cultivation is economically more viable than tobacco farming, as farmers are earning better returns without inflicting the severe environmental damage associated with tobacco. At a time when tobacco cultivation and tobacco products are causing immense harm to both public health and the environment, this change in Thanchi is encouraging.

Reportedly, tobacco curing depends heavily on firewood, which accelerates deforestation, degrades hillsides, and damages soil quality. These practices have reduced wildlife habitats and intensified environmental stress in an already vulnerable region like Thanchi. Yet despite these costs, tobacco dominated the agricultural landscape of the area for decades as a primary cash crop. According to Indigenous farmers, tobacco cultivation involved high input costs, constant labour, volatile markets, and long-term damage to their land, prompting many to return to traditional, environment-friendly crops. Reportedly, tobacco occupied 85 percent of the net cultivable land in 2020–21, but this has declined to about 30 percent by 2025–26. This is an encouraging development that must be sustained.

Recent studies have also shown that tobacco imposes an enormous economic burden on Bangladesh, costing Tk 87,544 crore annually—more than double the revenue it generates through taxes. Health-related expenses alone exceed Tk 73,000 crore, while environmental damages add thousands of crores more, reinforcing the fact that tobacco drains national resources rather than strengthening the economy.

Encouragingly, the move away from tobacco in Thanchi is proving both ecologically and financially sound. Farmers have reported improved soil conditions, the return of birds, and increased wildlife movement in areas once stripped for tobacco curing, while peanut and other green crop cultivation offers lower investment requirements, easier maintenance, and more stable returns than the volatile tobacco market. Credit is also due to local agricultural authorities, who have worked year-round with marginal farmers to curb tobacco cultivation and promote green alternatives.

The transformation along the Sangu River shows that with the right policy support, farmers will willingly choose crops that protect both their incomes and the land. The government should, therefore, build on this momentum by providing training, quality seeds, access to credit, and improved market linkages. Using Thanchi as a benchmark, similar pathways towards environment-friendly traditional crops should be developed for other tobacco growing regions of the country. By consistently supporting green farming, the government can significantly reduce deforestation while ensuring sustainable livelihoods, particularly in ecologically sensitive regions.​

 

[Saif]

Data gap starves farming promise

PICTURE a European retailer scanning a crate of mangoes. In the two seconds it takes the QR code to load, she decides whether Bangladesh is a supplier worth keeping. The mangoes are flawless; the digital dossier is blank. Sale lost — again. We...

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Data gap starves farming promise

PICTURE a European retailer scanning a crate of mangoes. In the two seconds it takes the QR code to load, she decides whether Bangladesh is a supplier worth keeping. The mangoes are flawless; the digital dossier is blank. Sale lost — again. We keep hunting for bigger cold-stores and faster ports, yet our produce is rejected in the milliseconds before it even leaves the farm. The choke-point isn’t infrastructure; it is information we never bothered to collect.

We are operating in an age where global agricultural trade has undergone a fundamental paradigm shift. It is no longer a simple exchange of goods for currency. It is an exchange of proof for trust. And in this new economy, Bangladesh is running a dangerous deficit. While our annual export earnings soared 114 per cent to $50 billion in the decade leading to FY 2022–23, agricultural exports grew by a comparatively sluggish 57 per cent to $843 million. In the grand scheme, agricultural shipments accounted for a mere 2.05 per cent of our total exports in FY 2024–25, a figure that exposes a critical underperformance in a sector that employs 45.4 per cent of our national workforce and contributes 11.66 per cent to GDP.


Export data disconnect: potential vs performance

BANGLADESH’S agricultural sector presents a paradox of immense potential constrained by structural data gaps. The country produces over 70 million tonnes of agricultural output annually and exports over 700 products to more than 140 countries. We rank impressively in global production — 2nd in jute, goat milk and jackfruit; 3rd in rice and freshwater fish. The processed food market is projected to grow at 15.01 per cent annually, and the overall agriculture sector has demonstrated a remarkable 13 per cent compound annual growth rate.

Yet, this potential remains tragically untapped. Despite having over 1,000 food processors and 250 exporters, only $1.03 billion in agro-exports was achieved in the 2024 financial year. The reality becomes clearer when examining rejection rates and market access challenges. A Bangladesh Institute of Development Studies report highlighted that poor quality and failure to meet international sanitary and phytosanitary standards remain major constraints. The problem isn’t just what we grow — it’s how we verify and communicate its quality in a global marketplace demanding digital proof.



Precision farming: the smallholder’s digital advantage


WE HAVE fundamentally misunderstood precision agriculture in the Bangladeshi context. Dismissing it as an unaffordable luxury of drones and sensors is a catastrophic error. At its core, its most revolutionary power for Bangladesh is shared visibility — creating a common, trustworthy language of data that connects the smallholder directly to the global buyer.

The data void is staggering. Post-harvest losses cripple Bangladesh’s food security and export potential, with 8–15 per cent of rice, 25–40 per cent (worth $2.4 billion) of fruits/vegetables, 17 per cent of poultry, and 20-30 per cent of fish wasted annually due to inadequate infrastructure and poor handling. A fundamental, often overlooked obstacle is that most smallholder farmers lack systematic record-keeping, leaving them without the basic data needed to navigate market inefficiencies, improve techniques or prove quality. This isn’t just an administrative gap; it’s a market-access catastrophe in an era where major importers like the EU, Japan and South Korea operate stringent, digitised traceability systems.

Paradoxically, Bangladesh’s agricultural structure — dominated by small plots averaging less than a hectare — could be transformed from a liability into its ultimate competitive advantage. Unlike vast, anonymous plantations, small farms are inherently easier to monitor and document. With basic digital tools, each smallholder’s story of sustainable practices, ethical labour and traditional knowledge could become a marketable brand, not just anonymous produce.


Policy imperative: data as critical infrastructure

CURRENT policies keep busy with the easy-to-see problems: freight rates that have jumped four-to-five times, packaging that arrives only after heavy import duties and other nitty-gritty costs that make our shipments expensive. Yet even if every one of these headaches vanished overnight, we would still be turned away at the border, because the real deficit is not money — it is the missing data that buyers now demand before they sign any deal.

Policy must recognise data collection and traceability systems as essential export infrastructure, as critical as cold storage or port facilities. The government’s existing incentives — reduced corporate income tax for fruit and vegetable processors, duty exemptions on capital machinery, 50 per cent tax exemption on export income — are valuable but insufficient. They must be complemented by specific incentives for digitisation.


Imagine a scenario where contract farmers growing export mangoes use simple, app-based logs to timestamp and geo-tag each intervention: organic fertiliser application, pest management, irrigation, harvest. This data populate a shared platform accessible (with permissions) to the exporter, BARI for verification, and the foreign importer. The buyer sees real-time adherence to protocols; the exporter manages quality proactively; the farmer receives precise instructions and timely payments based on verified compliance. This isn’t science fiction — it is basic digital traceability that delivers the ‘proof’ now demanded in global markets.


A targeted path forward: digital export zones

WE NEED not digitise all 16.5 million hectares of arable land overnight. The strategy must be targeted and pragmatic, beginning with high-value export clusters.

Establish digital export zones: Focus initially on sectors with established export potential — mangoes in Chapainawabganj, pineapples in Sylhet, vegetables in Manikganj. Implement mandatory but simple digital traceability protocols in these zones, creating models for replication.

Build minimal viable public platforms: Develop, through BARI and the ministry of agriculture, open-source, mobile-first traceability applications that work with basic smartphones. These should be interoperable with systems used by major importers in the EU and Middle East.

Incentivize data as export infrastructure: Provide specific tax benefits or grants for farms and exporters adopting certified traceability systems. Make digital adoption a criterion for accessing existing export incentives and support programmes.

Leverage smallholder narratives: Develop a national branding campaign around ‘Proof-Positive’ produce from Bangladesh, highlighting the stories of individual farmers and communities practicing sustainable, traceable agriculture. This addresses the growing global demand for authenticity and ethics in food sourcing.


Conclusion: exporting credibility in a trust-based world

BANGLADESH does not need to pave every acre with sensors; it needs to turn the first hundred hectares into living laboratories where data is as deliberate a crop as rice. Start with one exporter, one co-op, one app. When that container clears Rotterdam because the importer trusted the QR code more than the mango itself, the model will scale itself. The choice is no longer between twentieth-century subsidies and twenty-first-century drones; it is between exporting crates and exporting credibility. In the two seconds a European buyer spends scanning fruit, Bangladesh must learn how to harvest trust with the same diligence it harvests crops.


Afsana Akter is a research associate at Bangladesh Institute of Governance and Management.​