Eid cattle sacrifices down a million from 2019 as small farmers count the cost

The number of cattle sacrificed at Eid-ul-Azha in Bangladesh has been falling year on year, and small farmers say it is getting harder to recover what they spend on rearing. A report published on 22 May 2026 cited Department of Livestock Services statistics putting cattle sacrifices at 5,659,000 in 2019; in 2025 the figure was 4,650,000, still about a million short of the pre-Covid level several years after the pandemic. The question came back into focus ahead of Eid-ul-Azha, which was due to fall on 28 May that year. With production costs rising, farmers said, many marginal rearers who feared they would not get a fair price were cutting back on cattle.

According to the department's figures, 4,473,000 cattle were sacrificed in the country in 2017. The number then rose sharply over the next two years, to 5,391,000 in 2018 and 5,659,000 in 2019, the highest up to that point. Then came the Covid pandemic. The number of cattle sacrificed fell to 5 million in 2020 and dropped further to 4 million in 2021, a fall of roughly 1.6 million in two years by the department's own count. The contraction of the economy, the squeeze on household incomes and the restrictions of the pandemic years all weighed directly on the sacrificial market over those two years, those involved believe.

As conditions normalised after the pandemic the number began to climb again, but it did not return to its old peak. The department's series shows 4,565,000 cattle sacrificed in 2022, 4,581,000 in 2023 and 4,766,000 in 2024. In 2025, however, the figure slipped again to 4,650,000, about a million below the 2019 peak. Looking at this run of ups and downs, farmers and economists say demand for cattle at Eid has now settled at a new, lower level than its earlier high. The figures come from the Department of Livestock Services' own records; the department collects data on animals prepared and sacrificed across the country before and after each Eid.

Sheikh Farid, a farmer in Manikganj near Dhaka, reared four cattle for last Eid and sold them all, but says he did not get a fair price. This year he bought a single animal, on a bank loan. His three-maund bull has cost him Tk 120,000 all told, yet buyers are offering Tk 100,000. His shed, which can hold seven cattle, now houses one; if the price is not there this time, he says, he will give up the farm. The experience of small farmers like him helps explain why the number of cattle sacrificed in the country is slowly falling.

Kuddus Molla, a farmer in Harirampur, Manikganj, complains that prices rise in the towns and ports but not in the village, because cattle ultimately have to be sold to traders. It is these middlemen, he says, who set the price, so a farmer has little room to bargain. This year he therefore plans to take his cattle to the market himself and has decided not to sell if the price is not what he expects. Marginal farmers say that if they fail to get a fair price year after year, it is only natural that their appetite for rearing cattle wanes.

Ripon Kumar Mondal, professor of agricultural economics at Sher-e-Bangla Agricultural University, sees three main reasons behind the fall in cattle sacrifices: weaker purchasing power after Covid, higher cattle prices driven by production costs, and a growing tendency to sacrifice goats and sheep instead of cattle to save money. "Inflation is running above nine percent," he said, "so many in the middle class in particular are buying a goat for eight or ten thousand taka rather than spending a lakh or more on a cow." In his view, financial weakness is now the main reason cattle sacrifices are falling.

That shift in the market is visible at farm level too. Md Kabir, manager of a farm in Keraniganj with about two hundred animals, says demand is again strongest for small and medium cattle. He says that with feed, labour and electricity all costing more, prices this year are Tk 10,000 to 15,000 higher per animal than last year, and the rise is steeper still for large bulls. In other words, even as prices climb, buyers are leaning towards smaller animals or goats, squeezing the margin left to a marginal farmer.

Even as cattle sacrifices fall, the Department of Livestock Services sees no risk of a shortage on the supply side. It says farmers across the country readied about 5.7 million cattle and buffalo for this Eid, around 1.1 million more than the 4.6 million cattle sacrificed last year. So while demand has fallen, the number of animals prepared inside the country has risen, opening a clear gap between supply and demand.

At a press briefing in Dhaka early in May, Fisheries and Livestock Minister Mohammad Amin Ur Rashid put the number of sacrificial animals in the country at 12.3 million against expected sacrifices of about 10.1 million, leaving a surplus of more than 2.25 million. According to the minister, there was no need to import any animals to meet domestic demand this year. The official figures, in line with recent years, present the country as self-sufficient in sacrificial animals, though farmers say a surplus of supply may be a source of worry rather than relief for them.

Asked how a farmer absorbs the loss on unsold cattle when more animals are prepared than demanded, Md Shariful Haque, the department's deputy director for farms, argued that half the year's cattle slaughter takes place at Eid and the other half through the year at weddings and functions; so an animal unsold at Eid is sold at another time and there is no room for a loss. For officials, Eid is a major occasion in the country's cattle trade, but not the only one.

Farmers do not accept this argument. They say that a cow fattened to a specific weight for Eid, if later sold at meat prices, does not cover a year of feed and labour. The few days of the Eid market, they say, are when such an animal fetches its best price, and a failure to sell then means an inevitable loss. For the livestock trade the report's signal is clear: buyers' demand is moving towards smaller animals, and reducing dependence on traders for price is becoming the condition on which a marginal farmer survives.

Eid-ul-Azha, the festival of sacrifice, is one of the two main festivals in the Muslim calendar and falls on the tenth day of Dhul-Hijjah. Over the three days of the festival, families who can afford it sacrifice a permitted animal and distribute the meat; by custom it is divided into three parts, one kept for the household, one shared with relatives and neighbours, and one given to the poor. In Bangladesh the animals used are overwhelmingly cattle, along with goats, buffaloes and sheep. By the customary rules a goat or a sheep counts as one share, while a cow, a buffalo or a camel may be shared among up to seven people, each taking an equal portion. It is this system of shares, economists say, that is expanding as costs rise.

The animals used must meet long-standing conditions. By tradition a cow or buffalo should be at least two years old and a goat or sheep at least one year, and the animal should be healthy and free of serious defects such as lameness, blindness or extreme thinness. It is largely for this reason that farmers raise and fatten cattle specifically for the festival, aiming to have a sound, well-grown animal ready for the few days of the markets. An animal prepared to a particular weight for that window is hard to hold back or sell elsewhere, which is why a failure to sell at the right time and the right price hits a marginal farmer so hard.

Behind this market lies a sector that has grown into one of the mainstays of rural Bangladesh. According to the Department of Livestock Services publication Livestock Economy at a Glance 2023-24, the country had about 2.50 crore (25 million) cattle, 2.71 crore goats, 39 lakh sheep and 15 lakh buffaloes. Meat production reached 92.25 lakh tonnes that financial year, up from 87.10 lakh tonnes the year before, while milk production stood at 150.44 lakh tonnes. By the department's figures the sector contributed about 1.80 percent of national GDP and more than 16 percent of agricultural GDP in that year, and it grew at about 3.15 percent.

The sector is backed by dedicated public institutions. The Bangladesh Livestock Research Institute (BLRI), an autonomous body at Savar near Dhaka that carries out research on cattle, buffalo, goats, sheep and poultry, was set up under an ordinance of 1984. Sher-e-Bangla Agricultural University in Dhaka is one of the public universities that train the agricultural economists and veterinarians the sector depends on; Professor Ripon Kumar Mondal, quoted in this report, teaches there. Officials have long credited the research, breeding and extension effort behind the sector with gradually allowing domestic farms to replace the cattle once brought in from across the border.

That growth is the reason the country can now meet the entire demand for sacrificial animals from its own farms, officials say. For many years informal cattle imports from neighbouring India filled part of the Eid demand, but as those flows fell the government and the department encouraged domestic rearing, and in recent years officials have reported a comfortable annual surplus of animals. The 2026 figures followed the same pattern, with more than 1.23 crore animals prepared against demand of about 1.01 crore. A surplus, however, is a double-edged outcome for farmers, because when buyers hold back the same surplus raises the danger of a glut of unsold stock.

The department also reports that Bangladesh has become self-sufficient in meat, and that livestock is one of the country's main sources of animal protein and of income and employment in the countryside. For millions of smallholders, keeping a few animals is both a store of savings and a cushion against hard times, which is why a failure to get the right price at the biggest selling point of the year carries weight well beyond the farmgate and into the rural economy. Small farmers like Sheikh Farid and Kuddus Molla are therefore speaking not only of their own losses but, in effect, of the balance of a much wider sector.

Most of the year's sacrificial cattle are reared on small and medium farms and in rural households, often just a handful at a time, and fattened over many months for a single sale at Eid. In the weeks before the festival they are brought to the qurbani haats, the temporary and permanent cattle markets that spring up in cities and towns, the largest of them in Dhaka. Seasonal traders, known as beparis, buy animals from villages and from the north of the country and bring them to the big urban markets, hoping to sell within the few days the markets run. It is this dependence on traders that farmers like Kuddus Molla complain about, because much of the bargaining stays in the traders' hands.

In recent years the department has also promoted online, or digital, cattle markets, where animals are bought and sold on the basis of photographs and weights, giving farmers a chance to sell directly to buyers. But the bulk of the trade still happens face to face at the haats. Because the whole business is built around a short selling window of only a few days, selling on time is everything; an animal that does not sell in those days cannot be held cheaply, and both its weight and its price begin to fall.

The temporary Eid haats are a business in their own right. In Dhaka the two city corporations lease out the right to run each market, and buyers pay a market toll, known as hasil, on every animal they buy, collected by the leaseholder. The cost of trucking animals into the city, feeding and watering them through the days of the market, and the hasil itself all ride on the hope of a quick sale. When animals go unsold, these costs fall on the traders and farmers on top of what they had already spent rearing the animal.

Feed is the single biggest cost in fattening cattle. Animals in Bangladesh are generally fed straw, green grass and fodder along with concentrate feed made from rice bran, wheat bran, maize, pulse husks and oil cakes, much of which has to be imported. Farmers have long said that rising world prices for feed grains and oil cakes, together with a weaker currency, have pushed the cost of cattle feed up over recent years, while labour and electricity have also become dearer. When an animal fattened at that cost over a year does not fetch the right price at the qurbani market, the expected profit turns into a loss for the farmer.

Alongside rural households, a large number of commercial cattle-fattening and dairy farms have grown up over the past decade, many of them around Dhaka and in the north of the country. It is these larger farms, like the two-hundred-animal operation in Keraniganj, that bear some of the sharpest losses when a well-fattened, higher-cost animal fails to sell at the right price. It is partly for this reason that farmers and economists have long called for the rise in feed and farm-running costs to be treated as a serious problem, so that small and medium farmers are not discouraged from rearing sacrificial animals.

For many rural households, a sacrificial animal is a year's savings on four legs. A family buys a calf or a young bull, feeds it on straw, grass and bought concentrate for month after month, and the single sale at Eid is the return on all that outlay and labour. The words of farmers like Sheikh Farid and Kuddus Molla reflect one worry above all: if that return fails to come year after year, marginal farmers will lose still more of their appetite for rearing cattle for Eid, and in the long run that will squeeze the very sector through which the country became self-sufficient in sacrificial animals.

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

Sources: BBC Bangla; Department of Livestock Services (Livestock Economy at a Glance 2023-24); Ministry of Fisheries and Livestock; Banglapedia.