Bangladesh restaurant owners seek beef imports; ministry says there is no need

The Bangladesh Restaurant Owners' Association used a press conference in Dhaka in May 2026 to ask the government to allow beef imports. As BBC Bangla reported on 11 May, beef was then selling at Tk 800 to 850 a kilo, and the association said imports would keep the price within Tk 500. The Ministry of Fisheries and Livestock answered that the government had no plan to import meat.

Bangladesh has around 60,000 hotels and restaurants, about 25,000 of them in Dhaka, according to BBC Bangla. A few companies already import frozen beef, which goes to five-star hotels and some restaurants.

Imran Hasan, the association's secretary general, told BBC Bangla: "Our hotel and restaurant business depends on beef. Every country tries to keep its price at a reasonable level. Here it costs Tk 800 to 1,000. And the kind of meat restaurants need is hardly available."

He blamed large industrial groups and hobby entrepreneurs for controlling the farms, which he said had pushed meat prices up and made cattle rearing expensive for ordinary farmers. He conceded, however, that apart from the press conference the association had not yet sent the government a formal proposal.

Md Delwar Hossain, secretary of the Ministry of Fisheries and Livestock, told BBC Bangla that nobody had put such a proposal to the ministry and that government agencies were working to keep beef prices fair. "Enough livestock will come to market for this Eid sacrifice too, so there is no risk of prices rising because of supply. And we think there is no need to import at all, because even after the Qurbani demand is met the country has a surplus of more than 2.5 million animals," he said.

Figures from the Department of Livestock Services (DLS) for fiscal 2024-25 put the country's cattle at 25.171 million and buffalo at 1.532 million. Meat production that year was 8.954 million tonnes against an estimated demand of 7.792 million tonnes. The Import Policy Order issued in April 2022 for the first time required the department's prior approval to import beef, goat meat, chicken and other meat, and the department says such approval is not given without a special reason.

BBC Bangla traced the rise. For Ramadan in 2019 Dhaka South City Corporation fixed beef at Tk 525 a kilo; at the same time in 2021 it cost Tk 560 to 600, in 2022 up to Tk 650 to 700, and in 2023, by the market prices of the Trading Corporation of Bangladesh (TCB), Tk 720 to 750. India tightened cattle exports to Bangladesh after 2012 until the flow almost stopped, and many accuse some traders of using that to push prices up.

In January 2018 some Bangladeshi businessmen proposed importing beef from India, and Shafiul Islam Mohiuddin, then president of the FBCCI, called it a practical solution. But Fawzan Alavi, head of India's meat exporters' association, told the BBC that all the meat India exports is buffalo meat, since the export of cattle or beef from India is banned. The livestock ministry later rejected the idea, saying the country's annual meat demand of 7 million tonnes was met entirely at home and imports would put the sector in crisis.

On 7 April 2024 Brazil's foreign minister, Mauro Vieira, arrived on the first visit by a Brazilian foreign minister to Dhaka and offered processed beef; BBC Bangla reported the offer as under Tk 500 a kilo. Bangladesh replied that it would rather import live cattle for the Eid sacrifice. The Bangladesh Dairy Farmers Association said at the time that the country had plenty of cattle and local industry should be protected. The talks went no further, and the government stayed unwilling to take any step that could hurt domestic livestock production.

Photo: Wasiul Bahar / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Sources: BBC Bangla, bdnews24.com, Prothom Alo, Department of Livestock Services (DLS)