What agriculture contributes to Bangladesh's economy

A buffalo cart creaks along a muddy track in the haor, loaded with sheaves of freshly cut paddy. The scene, repeated every April and May across the wetlands of the northeast, is more than a picture of harvest. It is a picture of a large part of Bangladesh's economy. That paddy will go to the farmer's store, then to a rice mill, then to markets in town and onto the plates of millions. Along the way it will pay labourers, van drivers, millers, commission agents and shopkeepers. Bangladesh is an agricultural country: most of its people depend on farming in one way or another, and the sector underpins the country's food security, its jobs and a share of its exports.

Yet there is a puzzle in agriculture's place in the economy. Its share of national income falls every year, because industry and services are growing much faster. In employment, though, it remains the largest sector of all. Between those two numbers lies the real shape of the rural economy. Farming here is not only a producing sector; it is the main source of food, work, raw materials and cash moving through the countryside.

Gross domestic product, or GDP, is the total value of all goods and services produced in a country in a year. A widely cited estimate, based on 2023 figures, puts agriculture's share of Bangladesh's GDP at about 13 to 15 per cent. The latest official figure is lower. The finance ministry's Bangladesh Economic Review 2024, drawing on provisional estimates from the Bangladesh Bureau of Statistics (BBS), puts broad agriculture at about 11 per cent of GDP in the 2023-24 fiscal year. Broad agriculture here covers crops, livestock, fisheries and forestry together.

The same review reports that agricultural growth slowed to 3.21 per cent in 2023-24, from 3.37 per cent the year before. A falling share of GDP does not mean falling farm output. Output keeps rising, but factories, construction, transport and services are expanding faster still, so farming's slice of the whole looks smaller. Almost every country that has developed has gone through the same shift.

Rice is the biggest part of agriculture's contribution, with wheat, maize, potato, pulses, oilseeds, vegetables and fruit all playing a part. According to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), Bangladesh is the world's third-largest rice producer, and it produced about 39.1 million tonnes of rice in 2023. A study published in the journal PLOS One puts rice output in 1971-72 at only about 11 million tonnes, rising to 36.6 million tonnes by 2019-20. The land under crops barely grew; what grew was the yield from each field and the number of crops taken from it each year. A country some once mocked as a bottomless basket after independence was transformed, and it was farmers who did it. It is also among the world's top ten potato producers, with output above 10 million tonnes in 2023.

Agriculture's real weight shows in employment. The commonly quoted range is that 40 to 45 per cent of all jobs in the country are in farming. The BBS Labour Force Survey 2022 put the figure at 45.33 per cent, up from 40.6 per cent in the 2016-17 survey. So even as its share of GDP has fallen, the proportion of working people in agriculture has risen in recent years.

Farming is still the main livelihood of rural Bangladesh. It is not only landowning farmers who depend on it but sharecroppers, day labourers, fishers, livestock keepers, nursery owners, and the shopkeepers who sell seed and fertiliser. A large share of women work in raising poultry and cattle, saving seed, growing vegetables around the homestead and processing crops, though much of their labour never shows up as a wage.

There is an uncomfortable side to this. If close to half the workforce produces around a tenth of GDP, incomes per worker in farming will inevitably lag behind other sectors. Raising farm incomes is therefore not just an agricultural question; it is a question about poverty and inequality in the country as a whole.

Food security means that everyone has enough safe, nutritious food at all times. Rice, wheat, potato and vegetables grown at home form the base of it. A country that faced repeated food shortages after independence is now broadly self-sufficient in its staple, rice. Growing its own food has reduced its dependence on imports and softened the blow when world prices jump.

Behind that success are high-yielding varieties developed by the Bangladesh Rice Research Institute (BRRI) and the Bangladesh Agricultural Research Institute (BARI), the spread of irrigation, and the fieldwork of the Department of Agricultural Extension (DAE). Self-sufficiency is not complete, however. Most of the wheat the country eats is still imported, and it relies on imports for much of its edible oil and pulses too.

Fish are the other great pillar of food security. The Department of Fisheries' Yearbook of Fisheries Statistics 2023-24 shows total fish production of about 5 million tonnes that year, most of it from ponds and other closed waters. The FAO's State of World Fisheries and Aquaculture 2022 ranked Bangladesh third in the world for inland open-water capture and fifth for aquaculture. The old saying that fish and rice make a Bengali is borne out by the nutrition figures.

Having enough to eat is not the same as eating well, however. Rice still makes up most of what people eat, and nutritious foods such as pulses, vegetables, fruit, milk and eggs do not reach many poor households' plates regularly. The next challenge for farming is therefore not just more rice but a varied, nutritious diet within everyone's reach. A crop of pulses or oilseeds once a year in the rice field, vegetables and fruit trees around the homestead, small native fish in the pond: changes of that kind can make a large difference to a rural family's nutrition.

When Bangladeshi exports come up, ready-made garments come first to mind. But farm-based products are an important source of foreign exchange too, led by tea, jute and jute goods, leather and fruit.

Jute, once called the golden fibre, is the country's traditional export. Bangladesh is the world's second-largest jute producer and its largest exporter of raw jute. Growing demand for eco-friendly jute bags and packaging as a replacement for plastic is opening new possibilities for the crop. Turning raw fibre into yarn, cloth, bags, carpets or handicrafts adds far more value at home than selling it raw, and creates more jobs. For jute growers that means a steadier, better-paying market for their fibre. Cutting, retting, stripping and drying the crop all employ village labour, and the leftover jute sticks are used for fuel and fencing.

Tea matters as well. According to the Bangladesh Tea Board, the country produced a record 102.92 million kilograms of tea in 2023, nearly 10 per cent more than the year before. Alongside the hill gardens of Sylhet and Chattogram, small growers in Panchagarh and elsewhere in the north now contribute. Most of the tea is drunk at home, but surplus is exported.

Leather comes from the country's livestock, much of it from hides collected during Eid al-Adha. Finished leather, footwear and leather goods are sold to markets in Europe, Asia and beyond. Mangoes, jackfruit, vegetables and frozen fish, shrimp above all, are finding buyers abroad, beginning with the Bangladeshi diaspora.

Agriculture feeds factories as well as people. Jute, cotton, sugarcane and other crops are the raw materials of whole industries: jute mills run on jute, sugar mills on cane, textile mills on cotton. The leather industry depends entirely on livestock. Rice mills, flour mills, oil mills, animal-feed plants and cold stores all stand on what the fields produce.

The relationship runs both ways. When farming does well, raw materials are cheaper and more reliable, and factory costs fall. When factories run, farmers have a dependable buyer. That is why economists describe agriculture as the foundation of industrialisation.

Poverty in Bangladesh has fallen substantially over recent decades, and farming has played a large part. Rising farm output has reduced rural poverty. When land that grew one crop a year began to grow two or three, farmers earned more, labourers found more days of work, and rice stayed within people's reach.

Small farm enterprises have made many families self-reliant. A cow, a few goats, a small pond or a vegetable patch in the yard has become a steady source of cash and nutrition for poor rural households. Poultry and livestock have raised women's incomes, and with them their say in household decisions. Programmes run by non-governmental organisations and microfinance institutions have supported many of these ventures.

A sizeable food-processing industry has grown up around farm produce. Puffed rice, flattened rice and pickles, fruit drinks and juices, dairy products, spices, biscuits and packaged foods all begin in the field. The industry serves the domestic market and export markets too, where demand from Bangladeshis living in the Middle East, Europe and North America is a major driver.

Processing also cuts waste. In the season when tomatoes or mangoes flood the market and prices collapse, a factory that buys the surplus saves farmers from a loss. Growing this industry is part of making sure farmers get a fair price.

A glance at a rural market at harvest time shows how farming keeps the local economy moving. Farm output drives local trade. With money from selling paddy, farmers buy clothes, furniture and mobile phones, repair their houses and pay for their children's schooling.

Every stage of transport, distribution and retail creates work and income: owners of trucks, vans and boats, commission agents, wholesalers and retailers are all part of the flow. In a good harvest year, village shops sell more. When floods or drought destroy crops, the shock spreads through the whole local economy.

Many people think of agriculture as crop fields alone, but livestock is a large part of the sector. Milk, meat and eggs are the main sources of animal protein in the diet. Small and medium dairy farms and commercial poultry units have multiplied over the past two decades. The Department of Livestock Services has said in recent years that the demand for sacrificial animals at Eid al-Adha is being met largely from the country's own farms. For hundreds of thousands of farmers that means at least one big earning season a year, and a flood of cash through the rural economy.

The haor of the opening scene is a chapter of its own. This vast low-lying basin across Sunamganj, Habiganj, Moulvibazar, Sylhet, Netrokona, Kishoreganj and Brahmanbaria lies under water for several months a year. When the water recedes there is one big crop, boro rice, and hundreds of thousands of families rely on it for a whole year's food and income. When early flash floods drown the crop, the whole region suffers; people still remember April 2017, when early floods swept over vast stretches of boro in the haor. In the monsoon the same wetlands become an enormous store of fish.

Farming is changing in another way too. Many farmers now check the weather on their phones, look up market prices, and send photographs of diseased crops to get advice. By dialling 16123, the Krishi Call Centre run by the Agriculture Information Service, a farmer can speak to an expert. Combine harvesters, power tillers and irrigation pumps have sped up much of the work in the field. Some educated young people are investing in mushroom, fish, fruit or dairy farms and treating agriculture as a business. That shift can raise productivity and make farming attractive to a new generation.

The government has pushed mechanisation as well. From July 2020 to 2025 the Department of Agricultural Extension ran a Tk 3,020 crore project, Mechanisation of Agriculture through Integrated Management, which subsidised combine harvesters, reapers, rice transplanters and other machines by up to 50 per cent in most areas and 70 per cent in the haor. The higher rate for the haor has an obvious logic: there a huge crop must be cut in a few days before the early floods arrive, exactly when labour is scarcest. Critics note, though, that the big machines have mostly gone to better-off farmers or to entrepreneurs who rent them out. Making sure small farmers can hire those services at a fair price is now the bigger task.

For all its contribution, Bangladeshi agriculture faces serious challenges:

• Crop losses from a changing climate.
• Shrinking farmland.
• Too little modern technology and machinery.
• Farmers who cannot get a fair price.
• The impact of natural disasters such as floods and drought.

Climate change is already visible in the fields. In the coastal districts, rising salinity in soil and water leaves much land fallow in the dry season. In the haor, early flash floods from the hills can drown the boro crop before it ripens. In the north, drought and untimely rain damage crops. Higher temperatures at flowering raise the risk of empty, unfilled grains.

Farmland is being lost to housing, roads, factories and urban growth. The population keeps rising while there is no room to expand cultivation, so getting more from the same land is the only way forward.

Machinery is spreading, but much work is still done by hand, especially on small, fragmented plots. The problem of fair prices is an old one. When everyone sells straight after harvest, prices fall; months later consumers buy the same produce for much more, and the margin in between goes to middlemen.

These swings come round almost every year. In one season potato, onion or tomato prices fall so low that farmers cannot cover the cost of harvesting; the next season less is planted and prices soar. Without storage, reliable market information and ways for farmers to sell together as groups, that cycle is hard to break.

Meeting these challenges and making farming sustainable calls for attention to several areas:

• Better technology and more agricultural research.
• Improved irrigation and conservation of soil fertility.
• Organic and environmentally sound production methods.
• Low-interest, hassle-free credit and subsidies for small farmers.
• Greater competitiveness for farm products in export markets.

Research is already paying off. BRRI and the Bangladesh Institute of Nuclear Agriculture (BINA) have released rice varieties that tolerate salinity, submergence and drought. Spreading such varieties in the field, training farmers and getting good seed to them on time are now the big tasks.

In irrigation, the need is to reduce heavy reliance on groundwater, use more surface water, re-excavate canals and bring in water-saving methods. Keeping soil fertile means combining chemical fertiliser with organic manure, green manure and sensible crop rotation.

Small farmers often struggle to get credit because they lack collateral and face complicated paperwork. Hassle-free farm loans, crop insurance and a larger role for genuine farmers in the government's paddy and rice procurement would give them some protection when prices fall. Cold stores, warehouses and better roads to market let farmers hold their crop rather than selling in a hurry at a low price.

Competing in export markets will take investment in quality, food-safety standards and packaging. International buyers now want to know where and how a product was grown and how much pesticide was used. Production under Good Agricultural Practices, and systems to certify it, are a precondition for selling more abroad.

Agriculture is the backbone of Bangladesh's economy. Through food production, employment and foreign-exchange earnings it makes an extraordinary contribution to the country's social and economic development. Its share of GDP may well keep falling as the economy grows and diversifies. But as long as nearly half the workforce labours in the fields and every household's food comes from them, the health of farming will decide the health of the country.

If the challenges are met and a modern, sustainable farming system is built, agriculture's place in the economy will only become more secure. Raising the incomes and security of the cart driver in the haor, the farmer on saline land along the coast and the small tea grower in the north is, in the end, the most durable path to development for Bangladesh.

Photo: Buffalo carts carrying paddy in the haor, Balaram Mahalder / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)