Agriculture in Bangladesh's national budget: its place and the reality on the farm

On 17 May 2026, Jagonews24 published a column by Samiran Biswas, an agriculture and environment specialist, on the place of agriculture in Bangladesh's national budget and the reality farmers face. Biswas argued that farming remained one of the main foundations of the country's economy, food security and rural livelihoods, and that its share of the budget was not simply an allocation to one sector but a strategic question tied to national security, social stability and sustainable development. The column appeared three months after the 13th national election of 12 February 2026, after which the Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP) formed the government on 17 February, as a United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) report of 7 April 2026 recorded.

Biswas wrote that although agriculture's percentage share of gross domestic product (GDP) had fallen as industry and services expanded, jobs for a large part of the population, the food supply and the life of the rural economy still depended on it. He listed global wars, climate change, energy crises, unstable international markets and rising food prices as major challenges for developing countries, and argued that in such conditions a strong agriculture budget could protect domestic food security and economic stability. This report sets out his argument alongside the official figures and programmes on the subject that were public on the day the column appeared.

In Biswas's view, the biggest reason for agriculture's place in the budget is food security. He pointed out that the population keeps growing while arable land keeps shrinking, so adequate allocations for improved seed, fertiliser, irrigation, farm machinery and technology-based farming are essential. When the government gives farmers subsidies, incentives and other support, he wrote, production costs fall, farmers are encouraged to grow more, and the country can stay self-sufficient and feed its people even in a crisis.

He described subsidies as a cushion against the risks farmers work under: natural disasters, falling market prices and rising production costs. Subsidies on fertiliser, diesel, electricity and farm machinery cut the cost of production, he wrote, while special incentives, seed support and rehabilitation programmes for small and marginal farmers keep production going. He also called agriculture the centre of the rural economy: when farmers earn more, local markets, small businesses and transport revive, and larger allocations for agro-based small industry, food processing and rural entrepreneurs would create jobs and ease the pressure of migration to the cities.

Rice shows how much rests on these inputs. The USDA's Grain and Feed Annual for Bangladesh, published on 7 April 2026, estimated milled rice production in the 2025/26 marketing year at 37.65 million tonnes from 11.75 million hectares and forecast 37.4 million tonnes for 2026/27. Boro, the irrigated winter rice transplanted in December and January and harvested in April and May, makes up more than half of the annual crop, the report said. The USDA expected the 2026/27 harvest to fall by 0.7 percent because of lower boro yields, which it blamed on disruptions to irrigation and fertiliser application caused by fuel and fertiliser shortages; farmers had told its staff they were worried about diesel for the shallow and low-lift pumps they use to irrigate.

The same report described rice as the staple food of more than 170 million people. The government had cut import duties on rice to ease prices, and the average retail price of coarse rice in March 2026 was Tk 55 a kilogram, according to the Trading Corporation of Bangladesh. During the aman harvest of the 2025/26 marketing year the government procured about 857,000 tonnes of parboiled rice and about 152,000 tonnes of paddy at home, and public rice stocks stood at 1.56 million tonnes in March 2026, the report said. Wheat, the second staple, is grown on a small scale, and the country relies heavily on imports, which the USDA estimated at 7.4 million tonnes in the 2025/26 marketing year.

Biswas singled out the government's farmer card programme, writing that it had made farm support more transparent and effective by making it possible to list genuine farmers, so that subsidies, incentives, seed, fertiliser and credit could reach them directly. He called for investment in the budget to make the system more digital and data-based, with a farmer database, mobile-based advice and wider digital services as part of smart farm management.

When the column appeared, the programme was a month old and in its first, pre-pilot phase. Agriculture Minister Mohammad Amin Ur Rashid told a press conference at the Secretariat on 12 April 2026, as reported by the state news agency BSS, that 22,065 farmers in 11 upazilas of 10 districts would receive cards in the first phase. He said the card was a banking debit card, with accounts opened in the farmers' names at local branches of the state-owned Sonali Bank, and that farmers would use it at dealers' point-of-sale machines to buy fertiliser, seed, fish and livestock inputs and feed. In the pilot stage, landless, marginal and small farmers would receive a direct cash benefit of Tk 2,500 a year through the card.

The minister said farmers had been divided into five categories by land ownership: landless, marginal, small, medium and large. Besides crop farmers, the first phase covered fish farmers and fishers, livestock and dairy farmers and salt farmers. The programme was to run in three stages, pre-pilot, pilot and nationwide: after the pre-pilot, a pilot would follow in 15 upazilas, and the government planned to complete card distribution and the database across the country over the following four years. He described it as one of the government's priority programmes and said it had been outlined in the BNP's election manifesto.

Prime Minister Tarique Rahman opened the distribution on Pohela Boishakh, 14 April 2026, at Shaheed Maruf Stadium in Tangail, with other upazilas joining by video conference, Bangla Tribune reported that day. In the first round, 1,453 farmers of the Suruj block in Gharinda union of Tangail Sadar upazila were to receive cards, and the prime minister handed cards to 15 of them.

A column in the Daily Inqilab on 22 April 2026 by Mohammad Zakir Hossain, a senior information officer at the Ministry of Agriculture, named the eleven blocks: Kamalpur (Panchagarh Sadar), Panchpir (Boda, Panchagarh), Uthli (Shibganj, Bogura), Kripalpur (Shailkupa, Jhenaidah), Rajabari (Nesarabad, Pirojpur), Rajarchhara (Teknaf, Cox's Bazar), Aranyapur (Adarsha Sadar, Cumilla), Suruj (Tangail Sadar), Tenapacha (Goalanda, Rajbari), Fultala (Juri, Moulvibazar) and Gaibandha (Islampur, Jamalpur). He wrote that the government aimed to bring about 2.27 crore farmers into one database, and that cardholders were to receive ten kinds of benefit, including:

• direct cash support and subsidies on inputs such as fertiliser, seed and pesticide;
• priority farm credit on easy terms and at low interest;
• seed, fertiliser and other inputs at fair prices, and farm machinery at subsidised prices;
• crop and farm insurance to reduce farmers' risk in disasters;
• training in improved methods, and irrigation at fair rates;
• the chance to sell produce directly, and weather information and pest-control advice.

The ministry official also wrote that the card is issued free of charge, and that a farmer should contact the sub-assistant agriculture officer of the local block, who prepares the first list; the farmer's details on land and crops are checked in the field before a digital profile is created on the basis of the national identity card and mobile number.

The most recent full budget on the day of the column was that for fiscal 2025-26 (July to June), presented in June 2025 by Finance Adviser Salehuddin Ahmed of the interim government. The Daily Star reported on 5 June 2025 that it proposed Tk 39,620 crore for agriculture, food, livestock and fisheries, a 3.55 percent rise, and Tk 27,224 crore for the Ministry of Agriculture. That included Tk 17,241 crore for subsidies on fertiliser and other farm inputs, a figure nearly unchanged from the year before.

LightCastle Partners, a Dhaka consultancy, noted in its analysis of 5 June 2025 that agriculture's share of the Annual Development Programme fell from 5.0 percent in FY25 to 4.7 percent in FY26. The budget proposed cutting the withholding tax on the supply of paddy, wheat, potatoes and jute from 1 percent to 0.5 percent, exempted duties on cold-storage machinery, and planned 5,400 kilometres of new roads and 104 rural markets and growth centres. LightCastle warned that, with 46 percent of the deficit to be financed through bank borrowing, credit for smallholders and small agribusinesses could be squeezed in an already tight banking market.

Agricultural economists quoted by The Daily Star were critical. M Asaduzzaman, a former research director of the Bangladesh Institute of Development Studies (BIDS), said that over the years more attention had gone to subsidies than to productivity, and that paddy output in India and Pakistan was at least 30 percent higher than in Bangladesh. Agro-economist Jahangir Alam Khan said farm output had to grow by 4 to 5 percent a year to meet the Sustainable Development Goals on food and nutrition by 2030, and suggested that the government buy 20 to 25 key crops directly from farmers instead of only paddy and wheat. Professor Mohammad Jahangir Alam of Bangladesh Agricultural University in Mymensingh said the budget did not keep a separate allocation for agricultural research, as earlier budgets had.

The paper also cited Bangladesh Bureau of Statistics (BBS) figures: agriculture grew by only 1.79 percent in FY2024-25, the slowest pace in more than a decade, and its share of GDP fell from over 38 percent in the early 1970s to 11.3 percent in FY2022-23 and 10.94 percent in FY2024-25. This is the decline in percentage share that Biswas acknowledged at the start of his column, and the reason he gave for looking at agriculture through jobs and food rather than its share of output.

Biswas's call for support on fertiliser, diesel and electricity came in a season of rising costs. The USDA report described how the government controls the procurement, distribution and price of urea, muriate of potash (MOP), di-ammonium phosphate (DAP) and triple superphosphate (TSP). Before each of the boro, aus and aman seasons it assesses the needs of every district and upazila and allocates fertiliser month by month, and authorised dealers sell it at fixed rates under the watch of agriculture officials and the local administration. For FY2025-26 those rates were Tk 27 a kilogram for urea, Tk 20 for MOP, Tk 21 for DAP and Tk 27 for TSP, and they were unchanged as of March 2026.

Even so, the report said, farmers in many areas paid Tk 3 to 5 a kilogram above the fixed rates during the boro season, and in some northern potato-growing districts farmers bought urea, potash and phosphate above government prices because heavy use on potatoes left too little for boro rice. National fertiliser use reached 6.75 million tonnes in FY2024-25. The USDA's contacts said farmers tend to apply more than the recommended amounts, and that soil-testing facilities at the local level are inadequate, so many farmers do not know the recommended dose for their own fields.

Irrigation is the other heavy cost. Farmers needed more irrigation than before, the report said, because of delayed rains at the start of the aman season and excessive heat in the boro season, and the cost of growing boro rice had risen year after year with irrigation, fertiliser and labour. Biswas, for his part, wrote that drought in some places and excessive rain in others were putting farming at risk, that many rivers and canals had silted up and caused water shortages, and that the budget needed long-term plans for canal re-excavation, reservoir conservation, better irrigation and water management.

Prices for consumers were also under pressure. The USDA noted that inflation, which had been very high since mid-2022 and rose above 10 percent in July 2024, eased under the interim government's measures until October 2025 but had been rising again since November 2025.

Biswas wrote that developed countries were raising output with drones, sensors, artificial intelligence, smart irrigation and IT-based farming, and that Bangladesh needed special allocations for farm mechanisation, smart soil sensors, weather-based advice and digital farm platforms. He called for coordination between agricultural universities, research institutes and private innovators, and wrote that a shortage of money for research often slows progress, so long-term investment was needed to develop high-yielding, disease-resistant and climate-resilient varieties and to train farmers in modern cultivation, soil management and technology.

The USDA's field visits bear out the point about machines. Rice cultivation, its report said, remains heavily dependent on human labour because mechanisation is limited, and farmers in the north reported particularly high wages at transplanting time in early 2026 and expected a shortage of labour at harvest. In June 2025, Jahangir Alam Khan told The Daily Star that a farm mechanisation project offering subsidised machinery to farmers had shown promise and could have been relaunched in that year's budget.

The research bodies Biswas named carry much of this work. The Bangladesh Agricultural Research Institute (BARI), which he mentioned by name, was set up in 1976 as an autonomous institute under the Ministry of Agriculture and traces its origins to the Dhaka farm of 1908. Its headquarters are at Joydebpur in Gazipur, about 35 kilometres north of Dhaka, and it researches all crops except rice, jute, sugarcane and tea, which have their own institutes. Rice is the work of the Bangladesh Rice Research Institute (BRRI), founded on 1 October 1970 as the East Pakistan Rice Research Institute and renamed after independence, also headquartered in Gazipur.

According to the USDA report, BRRI had officially released 118 inbred and 10 hybrid rice varieties, but only a few were widely grown. BRRI dhan28 and BRRI dhan29 remained the most popular inbred varieties despite being more than 30 years old and susceptible to pests and diseases, and the Department of Agricultural Extension (DAE) was promoting newer, higher-yielding and more resilient ones. Farmers were also adopting BRRI dhan84, BRRI dhan92, BRRI dhan102 and BRRI dhan105, the report said, while hybrids from private seed companies were growing in popularity for their higher yields.

Biswas called Bangladesh one of the countries most at risk from climate change, with cyclones, floods, drought, salinity and irregular rainfall all hurting agriculture. He urged the budget to stress climate-resilient farming: research and extension for salt-tolerant rice, drought-tolerant crops, floating agriculture and adaptation technology, together with training and awareness for farmers about climate risk.

The Climate Risk Index 2026 of Germanwatch, an environment and development organisation, published in November 2025, ranked Bangladesh 13th among the countries most affected by extreme weather both in 2024 and over the 30 years from 1995 to 2024. The index ranks countries by the human and economic toll of extreme weather events.

Flash floods are one of the risks the extension service works around. The USDA report said the DAE was encouraging short-duration boro varieties in the haor wetlands of the Mymensingh and Sylhet divisions, where heavy rain in the Indian hills along the border can send flash floods downstream and sometimes destroy whole rice crops. Varieties that mature 10 to 15 days earlier, such as BRRI dhan84, BRRI dhan86, BRRI dhan101 and BRRI Hybrid dhan5, can greatly reduce such losses, the report said.

Floating agriculture, which Biswas named, is a practice the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) recognised in 2015 as a Globally Important Agricultural Heritage System. According to the FAO, floating gardens cover 2,500 hectares in the Gopalganj, Pirojpur and Barishal districts of south-central Bangladesh. Farmers lay bamboo on a dense layer of water hyacinth to form a buoyant bed and grow vegetables such as okra, ribbed gourd, Indian spinach, brinjal, cucumber, red amaranth and wax gourd on it, and the FAO puts their productivity at an estimated ten times that of land-based plots of similar size.

Biswas wrote that Bangladeshi farm products were slowly gaining ground in international markets, with openings to earn foreign currency from vegetables, fruit, tea, jute, spices and processed food, but that limits in international standards, storage and market management kept that potential from being used in full. He called for larger allocations for cold storage, processing, quality control and export support. He also pointed out that the food, jute, sugar, textile and dairy industries draw their main raw materials from farming, so agro-based industry could secure fair prices for farmers and create jobs, and he linked agriculture to rural incomes, poverty reduction, the Sustainable Development Goals, environment-friendly farming, organic fertiliser and safe food.

The 2025-26 budget had touched on the same points. The finance adviser said in his budget speech that 59 bottlenecks to agricultural exports had been identified and that steps were being taken to address them, The Daily Star reported, and the budget's measures included strengthening cold-storage supply chains and logistics, developing transport for farm produce, building a database of actors in the agricultural supply chain, and setting up specialised agro-processing zones and port facilities for exports.

The USDA report gives a sense of how farming feeds industry. About 90 percent of the country's maize goes to the feed industry, it said, driven by demand from poultry, dairy and aquaculture, and maize has become the second-largest grain crop after rice. Exports of wheat-based products such as bread, biscuits, cakes and pasta were estimated at 200 million US dollars in FY2025-26, mainly to Saudi Arabia, Oman, Malaysia, the United States and the United Kingdom, while exports of aromatic rice were forecast at 10,000 tonnes.

Most farmers in Bangladesh are small and marginal, Biswas wrote, and many lack the capital to farm and are forced to borrow at high interest, which raises their costs and exposes them to financial risk. He called for farm credit on easy terms, wider digital banking, and the introduction and expansion of crop insurance, so that farmers hit by disasters could recover quickly and production would stay steady. The farmer card, as the ministry described it in April 2026, listed priority low-interest credit and crop insurance among its intended benefits.

In his final section Biswas turned to what he called the reality. Although agriculture receives an allocation in the budget every year, he wrote, many farmers miss out on the benefits: the grip of middlemen in the market, rising production costs, the lack of fair prices, adulterated fertiliser and seed, and storage shortages are major problems, and budget announcements are often not matched by implementation. Enlarging the budget is not enough, he argued; good governance, transparency and effective implementation must also be ensured.

He called for long-term, practical plans drawn up jointly by agricultural universities, research institutes, government agencies and private innovators, and wrote that a farmer-friendly, technology-based and timely budget would not only raise food production but also strengthen poverty reduction, export earnings, rural development and sustainable growth. In his view, agriculture's importance in the budget is therefore not only economic: it is one of the strategic foundations of the country's future security and development.

Photo: Balaram Mahalder / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)

Sources: Jagonews24 (column by Samiran Biswas), Bangladesh Sangbad Sangstha (BSS), Bangla Tribune, The Daily Inqilab, The Daily Star, LightCastle Partners, United States Department of Agriculture Foreign Agricultural Service (USDA FAS), Germanwatch, Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), Wikipedia