Thousands of Tonnes of Mangoes Wasted for Lack of Storage and Certification

Large amounts of Bangladesh's mangoes are being wasted because there is no storage, modern processing technology, improved packaging or easy certification, said Naogaon agri-entrepreneur Sohel Rana. If these were in place, he said, local entrepreneurs could win a large share of the international market for processed mango products.

He was speaking at the roundtable "Fruit Processing: Problems and Prospects" moderated by Jagonews24 editor K. M. Zeaul Haque on Saturday, 27 June.

Sohel Rana said a major storm this season brought down about 150 maunds of his mangoes. Unable to get a fair price, he was sometimes offered only Tk 1 to 2 a kg, and after hiring workers to collect and sell the fruit, only the labour cost was covered. With storage, fallen green mangoes could have been made into pickles and ripe ones into other processed products, and both could have been kept longer and sold according to market conditions.

Processed mango products from India and the Philippines, such as aamshotto (mango leather), mango bars and mango powder, are sold on e-commerce platforms like Alibaba and Amazon. Bangladesh can make quality products, he said, but international certification must be made simpler and faster, because farmers and entrepreneurs lose interest when it takes too long. Thailand's processed mango products are well known globally; Bangladeshi products are of good quality but fall behind for lack of advanced packaging technology and infrastructure.

Every year storms and other natural causes destroy large quantities of mangoes, often sold to large companies for next to nothing, and even they cannot buy everything, so thousands of tonnes rot in the field. He called on large industries to do more.

Entrepreneurs receive some training, he said, but not the help they need with packaging, storage and processing infrastructure. What is needed now is modern machinery and technical support, not just training. With proper guidance and support, he believes, fruit processing can make an important contribution to the economy.

Source: Jagonews24. First published in Bengali on The Agro News.