Fruit flies damage Fazli mangoes in Chapainawabganj; growers put loss at Tk 100 crore

In mid-July 2026, with the late-season Fazli harvest under way, fruit flies were ruining Fazli mangoes in orchards across Chapainawabganj, the north-western district often called Bangladesh's mango capital. Jagonews24 reported from the district on 14 July 2026 that infested fruit was rotting on the trees and dropping to the ground, so that growers were losing output while their costs went up. Growers and others in the trade put the value of the Fazli lost to the pest this season at about Tk 100 crore. That figure was their own estimate, voiced in the report by the general secretary of a mango growers' co-operative in Shibganj upazila; the agriculture department told the paper it had no count of how many orchards had been hit.

Fazli is one of four Chapainawabganj mangoes that hold geographical indication (GI) status, together with Khirsapat, Langra and Ashwina. Growers told the paper that the recognition had brought them little benefit in the field. The co-operative leader said that in many orchards 40 to 50 per cent of the fruit was being lost to fruit flies, while the newspaper's own summary of the report spoke of 40 to 60 per cent of the fruit being damaged. Growers linked the outbreak to several days of heavy rain, and a government horticulture scientist said climate change and excessive rain had increased the infestation this season, with Fazli growers hit hardest.

Shibganj upazila produces more mangoes than any other part of Chapainawabganj and grows Fazli on a large scale. Ujjal Hossain, a grower in Shyampur union of Shibganj, had Fazli on 5 bighas of land this season, and when the report was written the fruit had reached the time for selling. After several days of heavy rain, fruit flies attacked his orchard, and he said about 50 per cent of his mangoes had been ruined. Pheromone traps and other measures had not given the results he hoped for, and he was worried about whether he would even recover what he had spent.

Rafiqul Islam, a grower in Kansat union, said families like his had made their living from Fazli for years and that the mango carries the heritage of the area. Growing it had become difficult, he said. The trees are old and very large, so tending them costs more: growers have to climb them to spray pesticide and must apply more fertiliser, which makes Fazli far costlier to produce than other varieties. "We expected a good harvest this year. But after several spells of rain and the change in the weather, fruit fly attacks increased," he said. "Even with pheromone traps, pesticides and other methods we cannot save the mangoes. Many mangoes in the orchard have been ruined. If this goes on, it will be hard to make a profit from Fazli."

Shahidul Islam, another grower in Shyampur union, said he had watched Fazli being grown since childhood and had grown it himself for a long time. The variety was once in great demand, he said, and good Fazli had sold for Tk 5,000 a maund, but now the same mango was selling for Tk 900 to Tk 1,000 a maund. Because prices did not cover his costs, he said, he had been forced to cut down five large Fazli trees in his orchard the previous year and had decided to sell six more trees this year. If things went on this way, he said, it would be hard to keep Fazli trees in future.

Mojibur Rahman, who had been buying mangoes at Kansat market for 10 years and sending them to Chattogram and other parts of the country, said the heavy rain had left the Fazli in very poor condition. Good-quality fruit was then selling for Tk 1,500 to Tk 1,600 a maund. When fruit flies attack, he said, the mango is pierced and the flesh inside spoils, which makes the fruit hard to sell; for that reason demand for Fazli was falling day by day.

Ismail Khan Shamim, general secretary of the Shibganj Mango Producer Co-operative Society in Chapainawabganj, said Fazli had once been the most widely produced mango variety in the district, but many growers were gradually moving away from it because of a range of problems. "Fazli suffers more from pests and diseases. At this time fruit fly attacks in particular are causing heavy damage. In many orchards 40 to 50 per cent of the mangoes are being ruined by fruit flies," he said. Growers were trying different methods without getting the results they wanted, he added, so many were losing interest in Fazli. He put the estimated value of the ruined mangoes at about Tk 100 crore.

By the growers' own account, the fruit fly struck a crop that was already hard to make pay. Most Fazli trees in the district are old, and hardly any new Fazli orchards had been planted in the past decade; growers still produce the fruit by tending trees handed down through generations. Because Fazli trees grow very large, they need extra labour and money. Growers have to climb them to spray, and they apply larger amounts of fertiliser. Controlling pests and diseases costs more than in other varieties, and spraying from high up in big trees wastes more pesticide and raises labour costs.

Growers said that although the GI-recognised Fazli has a proud heritage, they were not seeing its benefits in the field. With high production costs and comparatively low market prices, they were counting losses instead of profits, because pest attacks begin once the fruit has set, and this season the fruit fly was spoiling much of the crop.

Earlier in the season, Prothom Alo had described the same pressures. In a report from the district published on 14 June 2026, it said Kansat mango market in Shibganj, described as the country's largest, had opened on 1 June, and that the Fazli was also in a poor state. A leading Shibganj grower told the paper that Fazli trees had once covered about 80 per cent of the orchard area in the upazila but now covered roughly half, because growers were cutting them down or replacing them with hybrid varieties after several years of unsatisfactory prices. Farmers also said foreign varieties such as Amrapali, Banana mango and Katimon were reaching the market early and squeezing out the traditional ones.

Growers' complaints about how mangoes are weighed added to the strain. Prothom Alo reported that at Kansat mangoes were being sold at 54 to 56 kilograms to the maund, and that after payments to porters, weighers and commission agents' workers the effective weight came to about 60 kilograms. In May 2026 a Shibganj farmer told BSS, the state news agency, that a maund should be 40 kilograms but that buyers in some areas were taking 50 to 55 kilograms, and that farmers were getting about Tk 40 a kilogram for fruit that sold for Tk 80 to Tk 100 a kilogram in Dhaka. The deputy commissioner told BSS that the district administration would raise the long-standing weight dispute with higher authorities.

Growers were using several methods against the pest, and the pheromone trap was chief among them. The traps were being set up in orchards to stop the fly from spreading. Each trap cost about Tk 250, and many growers were using several, which added to their costs. In the report's description, a trap is a small plastic bucket or container holding a special pheromone lure, a chemical with an artificial scent; holes are cut on two sides and the trap is hung from a branch of the mango tree with string. Male flies drawn by the scent enter the container and are caught or die, which reduces the number of males, disrupts breeding and so keeps later attacks largely in check. Growers complained, however, that even after spending so much on traps they could not fully control the fly, so their costs were rising while their yields fell.

Ismail Khan Shamim said fruit bags can prevent fruit fly attack to a large extent, but for several years most of the imported bags had been of poor quality. Anyone could bring them in and sell them as they wished, he said, and agriculturists were not effectively monitoring their quality. As a result growers were not getting the expected results even after bagging their fruit, and they were the biggest losers.

Nayan Mia, the Shibganj upazila agriculture officer, said fruit flies often attack Fazli orchards, but orchards where growers spray regularly against the pest have comparatively fewer problems. Growers were being advised to plant late-season varieties instead of Fazli, he said. There was no compensation scheme for affected growers at the time, and the agriculture department had no specific figures on how many orchards the fly had damaged.

Md Abdul Halim, additional deputy director (crops) of the Department of Agricultural Extension (DAE) in Chapainawabganj, said fruit fly attack was nothing new: the pest had been damaging mangoes for a long time. It is a pest of fruit in general, he said, but the damage is greater in Fazli. Growers were being advised to use pheromone traps and encouraged to use more fruit bags. Asked why the fly had not been controlled where bags were used, he said there had been a shortage of fruit bags this season, so many growers had used poor-quality bags, which had caused the problem. The department, he said, trains growers on these matters all the time.

Dr Md Sharaf Uddin, acting chief scientific officer of the Regional Horticulture Research Station in Chapainawabganj, told Jagonews24 that there is no alternative to fruit bags for keeping the quality of all mangoes, not only Fazli. Bagging reduces insect attack, keeps the fruit's natural colour and taste and brings a better market price, he said, and growers in Chapainawabganj and other regions were using bags widely, especially to produce high-quality fruit fit for export. But the supply of poor-quality bags had grown in recent years, and many growers using them were not getting the expected benefit and were instead losing money. Good bags protect mangoes from disease and harmful insects, he said, but poor ones often fail to, which can lead to spots, rot and other problems on the fruit, so growers must be careful when buying them.

He described the fruit fly as one of the most harmful pests of mango: it lays its eggs by piercing the skin of the fruit, which then spoils. Pheromone traps attract and control the males, he said, which also makes it possible to reduce the use of chemical pesticides. To cut their losses, growers were being advised to take up late-season varieties, and emphasis was being placed on caring for orchards with modern technology and proper management. Neither the officials nor the scientist named a pesticide or a dose in the report; a grower who is considering a spray should take the advice of the upazila agriculture officer.

Three days before this report, on 11 July 2026, Jagonews24 had published a separate report from the district on the problems growers were having with the fruit bags meant to protect their mangoes.

Banglapedia, the national encyclopedia of Bangladesh, lists the mango fruit fly, under its older scientific name Dacus dorsalis (family Tephritidae, order Diptera), among the major pests of mango in the country, alongside mango hoppers, fruit weevils, a stem borer and a shoot borer. The species is now called Bactrocera dorsalis and is commonly known as the oriental fruit fly. It is native to South-East Asia and has been recorded on more than 200 kinds of fruit and nut plants; mango is among the hosts in which females most often lay their eggs.

A female pierces ripening fruit with her ovipositor and lays her eggs in batches of 3 to 30 under the skin; in the field a female typically lays about 1,200 to 1,500 eggs. The eggs usually hatch within a day, and the larvae feed on the flesh of the fruit for roughly 6 to 35 days before leaving it and burrowing into the soil under the tree, usually in the top 4 centimetres, to pupate. Pupation normally takes 10 to 12 days. In summer conditions the whole cycle from egg to adult takes about 16 days, and adults usually live one to three months, so the pest can build up quickly during a warm, wet harvest season.

Researchers at Sher-e-Bangla Agricultural University in Dhaka, writing in the Journal of Agriculture, Food and Environment in June 2022, described the damage this way: the larvae feed on the decomposing flesh of the fruit, and infested fruit quickly rots, becomes inedible or drops from the tree, causing direct loss to the farmer. They noted that, beyond this direct harm, the presence of fruit flies is linked to quarantine restrictions imposed by countries that import fruit. Citing earlier work, they wrote that direct damage had ranged from 30 to 100 per cent where the pest was not managed, depending on the fruit's maturity stage, variety, region and season, and that an earlier Bangladeshi study had recorded 37.50 per cent infestation of mango by fruit flies.

The same study collected adult flies with methyl eugenol traps in farmers' mango orchards in Dinajpur and Thakurgaon districts between April and June 2020 and identified four species. The oriental fruit fly made up 85.41 per cent of the catch, the melon fruit fly 8.81 per cent, the pumpkin fruit fly 3.34 per cent and the peach fruit fly 2.44 per cent, confirming the oriental fruit fly as the main species in Bangladesh's mango orchards.

The trap used in that 2022 study was the one designed by scientists of the Bangladesh Agricultural Research Institute (BARI), which the authors said is popularly known as the "magic trap". They described it as a cylindrical plastic container of 3 litres, 20 to 22 centimetres tall, with a triangular opening about 10 to 12 centimetres high and wide cut in two opposite sides, the base of each opening 3 centimetres above the bottom. Water with two or three drops of detergent is kept inside, and cotton soaked in the lure is tied inside with thin wire. Flies that enter fall into the water and die, and the water level has to be checked regularly so that the trap does not dry out. In the study, traps were hung from the lower branches of mango trees from 15 April, before the fruit was fully mature, until the last harvest.

The lure in such traps, methyl eugenol, attracts male fruit flies and traps them in large numbers, which disrupts mating. A 2020 paper in the journal Crop Protection refers to these devices as methyl eugenol kairomone traps, meaning the lure is an attractant that draws the males rather than a scent produced by the females themselves.

That paper, by M. S. Hossain and colleagues, compared ways of managing the oriental fruit fly in Bangladesh during the 2017 mango season, aiming at an integrated pest management (IPM) programme for fruit free of both flies and pesticide residues. It tested bagging fruit with double-layer brown paper bags, cloth bags and polythene bags, methyl eugenol traps and protein hydrolysate bait lures against conventional spraying with a profenofos and cypermethrin product. Bagging with double-layer brown paper bags 42 days before harvest performed best: fruit infestation fell to zero, marketable yields were significantly higher than under conventional pesticide management, and the marginal benefit-cost ratio was nearly twice that of any other treatment. The authors attributed the return to high fruit quality and to the bags being usable for two seasons, and they recommended that double-layer brown paper bagging be part of a full IPM package for mango.

Bagging had spread fast in the mango districts. The Daily Star reported in July 2022 that the method was first used in 2016, when about 60,000 bags were used, and that about 12 crore bags were used in 2022, about 10 crore of them in Chapainawabganj. Dr Sharaf Uddin told the paper that demand was growing by roughly 1 to 1.5 crore bags a year and that the bags protect fruit from pests, storms, heavy rain and hail. According to the report, bags go on in April and May, each bag cost about Tk 4 plus Tk 1 for labour, the extra cost came to about Tk 1,000 a maund, and bagged mangoes could fetch about Tk 3,200 a maund against Tk 1,800 for ordinary fruit. Only medium and large farmers were using bags at the time, the paper said, and researchers wanted the 63 per cent import duty on bags reduced so that small farmers could afford them.

Fazli is a late-maturing mango that comes to market after the other main varieties. A single fruit can weigh up to a kilogram, and the variety is widely used for jams and pickles in the cuisine of the subcontinent. It is grown in the Rajshahi division of Bangladesh and, across the border, in Malda and Murshidabad in West Bengal, India. Banglapedia lists Fazlee among the country's elite mango varieties and notes that superior varieties are grown mostly in Rajshahi, Nawabganj (now Chapainawabganj) and Dinajpur.

Geographical indications in Bangladesh are registered under the Geographical Indication of Goods (Registration and Protection) Act 2013 (Act No. 54 of 2013) by the Department of Patents, Designs and Trademarks (DPDT) under the Ministry of Industries. A GI ties a product's name to the place whose climate, soil or tradition gives it its character, and in Chapainawabganj's case four mango names now carry it.

• Khirsapat (also called Himsagar): BARI applied in February 2017 on behalf of Chapainawabganj's growers, and the certificate was handed over on 27 January 2019, making it the third Bangladeshi GI after jamdani and hilsa.
• Fazli: Rajshahi was first given the Fazli GI by DPDT. Chapainawabganj's farmers' association petitioned against this in early October 2021, a tribunal formed by DPDT heard the case, and on 24 May 2022 the department decided that both districts could use the name. In April 2023 bdnews24 described the Fazli recognition as held jointly in both districts' names.
• Langra and Ashwina: the application was filed on 19 February 2017 by the then chief scientific officer of the Regional Horticulture Research Station in Chapainawabganj, and both received GI certificates on 25 June 2023.

When the Langra and Ashwina certificates were issued, a DPDT deputy registrar told The Daily Star that GI products fetch a higher price when they are exported. India had registered the Fazli mango of Malda in West Bengal as a GI years earlier, The Daily Star noted in 2019. For the Fazli growers quoted in July 2026, however, the label had not lifted the price they received at Kansat.

Chapainawabganj district, in Rajshahi division, covers 1,702.55 square kilometres, according to Banglapedia. It borders West Bengal in India on the north, west and south, and Rajshahi and Naogaon districts on the east, and is made up of Barind tract, diara and char land. Its main rivers are the Padma, the Mahananda and the Pagla. Nawabganj was a thana of Malda district until 1947, became part of Rajshahi district at partition, was made a subdivision in 1948 and became a district in 1984. Of its five upazilas, Shibganj is the largest, at 525.42 square kilometres.

Shibganj is crossed by the Padma, the Mahananda, the Pagla and the Mara Ganga. It has 15 unions, among them Kansat and Shyampur, where the growers quoted in the report farm. Banglapedia lists mango, jackfruit and litchi as its main fruits and mango first among its exports, names Kansat Hat among its noted markets, and records agriculture as the main source of income for 59.25 per cent of households.

For the 2026 season, the district's DAE office told BSS in May that mango had been planted on 37,487 hectares and that the production target was 458,912 tonnes. The deputy director said Chapainawabganj mangoes taste better because of the district's climate, soil and geography but ripen later than those of other districts. No mango harvest calendar was set that year: after a meeting on 11 May, growers were allowed to sell fruit as soon as it ripened, and ripe Guti and Gopalbhog were already being reported from 14 May. The Jagonews24 report gave the same production target, about 458,000 tonnes, and put its market value at about Tk 5,000 crore. Prothom Alo, in June, estimated the district's yearly mango trade at Tk 6,000 crore to Tk 8,000 crore and said more than one lakh people depended on mangoes for their living.

Mango is also one of the country's main fruits. The 2022 study cited above, using Bangladesh Bureau of Statistics figures for 2020, put national mango production at 1,222,368 tonnes from about 95,000 hectares and said mango ranked first among fruits by area and third by production. The Daily Star reported in 2019 that the north-west, mainly the Rajshahi region, accounted for 67 per cent of national mango production.

The advice given by both the upazila officer and the research scientist was to turn to late-season varieties. The Regional Horticulture Research Station in Chapainawabganj, which belongs to BARI, was known in earlier years as the mango research centre. The Business Standard reported in September 2022 that the hybridisation that produced BARI Aam-4, a cross between the Florida variety M-3896 and the local Ashwina, began there in the early 1990s. Ashwina itself is a late mango that traditionally reaches the market in August, after the sweet varieties of Chapainawabganj and Rajshahi have run out.

Growers' leaders had long asked for more research capacity. Prothom Alo reported in June 2026 that the demand for a full mango research institute in the district had not been met and that the existing regional horticulture research station was short of staff and lacked modern laboratories. At the time of the July report, the upazila officer said there was no compensation for growers who had lost their Fazli, and the DAE's additional deputy director said the department's answer was training, pheromone traps and better fruit bags.

Photo: Fozli.com / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Sources: Jagonews24, BSS, Prothom Alo, The Daily Star, The Daily Star Bangla, bdnews24, The Business Standard, Banglapedia, Journal of Agriculture, Food and Environment (Sher-e-Bangla Agricultural University study, 2022), Crop Protection (Hossain et al., 2020), WIPO Lex, Wikipedia