Mango Orchard Area Shrinks in Rajshahi and Chapainawabganj as Fish Ponds Spread

The land under mango orchards fell in the 2025-26 fiscal year in Rajshahi and Chapainawabganj, the two districts best known in Bangladesh for their mangoes, according to Department of Agricultural Extension (DAE) figures reported by Jagonews24 on 6 March 2026. Farmers, hoping for quicker and higher earnings, were cutting down orchards and digging up paddy land to make fish ponds, and the change raised fears of a lasting shift in how land is used in the two districts.

The figures came at the height of the flowering season, when the region's orchards were in bloom, and they set two of the region's main farm businesses, mangoes and pond fish, against each other for the same land.

In Rajshahi district, mango orchards covered 19,603 hectares in the 2024-25 fiscal year. In 2025-26 the area fell by 541 hectares to 19,062 hectares. Agriculture officials said the district had about 37 lakh (3.7 million) mango trees, and that about 60 percent of them had flowered so far that season. The state news agency BSS, reporting the same DAE figures on 26 February 2026, put the number of trees in Rajshahi at 3,695,277.

Chapainawabganj, regarded as the country's main mango-producing district, also lost orchard area. Orchards covered 37,487 hectares in 2025-26, against 37,504 hectares in 2024-25, a fall BSS described as 17 hectares. The district had 92.4 lakh (9.24 million) mango trees, about 70 percent of which had flowered that season; BSS gave the count as 9,244,765 trees.

Naogaon, the third large mango district of the region, went the other way. Jagonews24 reported that orchards there grew from 30,300 hectares the previous year to 30,310 hectares; BSS, citing the DAE on 26 February, gave the 2025-26 area as 30,500 hectares. Both reports agreed that Naogaon's orchards had grown slightly while Rajshahi's had shrunk.

The DAE's Rajshahi region covers four districts: Rajshahi, Naogaon, Natore and Chapainawabganj. According to the department's figures reported by BSS in February 2026, the four districts together had 92,552 hectares of mango orchards with 34,960,554 trees, and about 63 percent of the trees had blossomed by late February. Natore had 5,069 hectares of orchards and 1,486,187 trees, 53 percent of them in bloom.

The flowering was good that year. A chief scientific officer of the Rajshahi Fruit Research Center told BSS that winter had ended without late fog or rain and that temperatures had risen gradually, so the trees kept up their flowering. The DAE's additional director in Rajshahi said the department expected an excellent yield and was working to help farmers export mangoes.

Agriculture officials and farmers blamed the rapid spread of fish farming for the decline in orchards. Farmers expected faster and surer profits from fish than from mangoes. Mango growing, they said, was exposed to erratic weather, pest attacks and unstable prices, risks that fish farming did not carry in the same way.

Farmers also said rising input costs, a shortage of labour, too little cold storage and unpredictable yields had made mango farming increasingly risky, pushing them towards fish.

Shahidul Hossain, a mango farmer in Bagha upazila of Rajshahi, told Jagonews24: "A decade ago, applying fertiliser and pesticide once a year was usually enough for mangoes. But now, because of climate change, pests and diseases have increased, and farmers have been forced to spray twice as much pesticide. As a result production costs have gone up and profits have fallen."

Nasir Ali, a fish farmer in Paba upazila, said: "Fish farming is 10-15 times more profitable than traditional rice and mango farming. That is why most of our orchards have now been turned into ponds."

Others gave similar reasons in the weeks before. An associate professor of economics at the University of Rajshahi told BSS in February 2026 that farmers were cutting down mango trees mainly because profitability had declined: production had fallen and growers were not getting fair prices. He said most of Rajshahi's mango varieties ripen late, so they reach the market at the same time as mangoes from Naogaon and Rangpur and prices drop, while Satkhira's earlier mangoes fetch better prices. Because mangoes are perishable and cannot be stored like potatoes, he said, low prices without proper storage discourage farmers from carrying on the following year. He added that with rice prices and demand high, some farmers were thinking of returning to paddy.

Ponds also earn money for landowners who do not farm fish themselves. A fish farmer in Puthia upazila told BSS in July 2025 that many landowners were digging new ponds to lease to fish farmers, and that a bigha of pond was then leasing for Tk 30,000 to Tk 40,000 a year.

The orchard figures were part of a longer change in the district's land. Bangladesh Bureau of Statistics (BBS) data cited by Jagonews24 showed that between 2015 and 2023 net cropped land in Rajshahi district alone fell by 16,159 hectares, while inland water bodies grew from 15,044 hectares to 24,498 hectares over the same period.

The same loss of 16,159 hectares was cited, for the period 2015 to 2024, by a retired professor of zoology at the University of Rajshahi in a BSS report of 9 January 2026. He alleged that the real figure could be considerably higher because of the large number of unregistered and illegal ponds in the district. The same report said that, according to sources close to the DAE, about 90,000 hectares of triple-cropped land had been lost across Rajshahi, Chapainawabganj, Naogaon and Natore over 17 years.

Pond numbers tell the same story. According to official data reported by New Age in November 2025, Rajshahi district had 40,788 ponds in 2015 and 51,275 in 2025.

Fish output has grown with them. BSS reported in January 2026 that Rajshahi had produced 84,803 tonnes of fish in the previous fiscal year against a local demand of 52,063 tonnes. In July 2025 the district fisheries officer told BSS that ponds in the district covered 13,050 hectares, produced around 84,000 tonnes of fish a year and gave work to about 288,000 people, and that fish production in Rajshahi had doubled in recent years as the number of ponds rose.

At the level of the division, the Department of Fisheries' divisional director told BSS in the same report that fish farmers had harvested 476,000 tonnes of fish in the previous fiscal year from 403,000 hectares of water bodies of various kinds, against a demand of 404,000 tonnes for about 1.92 crore people in the division.

Most of Rajshahi's pond fish are grown in composite culture, also called polyculture. The Department of Fisheries' divisional deputy director explained to BSS in October 2025 that polyculture means rearing compatible species with different feeding habits in the same pond so that the pond's natural food is fully used. The main species are the major carps, rui (rohu), katla and silver carp, and farmers were increasingly adding freshwater prawn and shrimp.

Some farmers combine fish with other produce. BSS described integrated rice and fish farming, in which fish stocked in paddy fields help fertilise the crop, and composite farms where poultry, ducks and vegetables are raised around the ponds. One farmer in Mohanpur upazila with five large ponds was reported to send live fish to Dhaka regularly by truck.

Live fish is the district's speciality. The district fisheries officer told BSS in July 2025 that Rajshahi and the surrounding districts had long been pioneers in supplying live fish to other parts of the country, including Dhaka, and that Rajshahi had become a fish-surplus district. In November 2025 the government's fisheries and livestock adviser, speaking at a fisheries summit at the University of Rajshahi, said Rajshahi supplied around 40 percent of locally farmed fish across the country and had more than 600 commercial fish farmers, New Age reported.

At the same event the adviser urged authorities and farmers not to expand fish farming onto land used for rice and other food crops, and to farm fish instead where crop production was no longer possible. She warned that indiscriminate conversion of farmland would threaten food security, New Age reported.

Professor Mostafizur Rahman, chairman of the Department of Agronomy and Agricultural Extension at the University of Rajshahi, warned Jagonews24 that excessive pond digging was changing the soil structure and drainage patterns, which would make it hard to bring the land back into orchards or crops in future. He said such practices disrupt the natural recycling of soil nutrients and, by permanently changing fertile land, could threaten long-term food security.

The retired zoology professor quoted by BSS in January 2026 made a similar point: indiscriminate pond excavation removes fertile topsoil and spreads infertile subsoil over the land around it, leaving fields unfit for cultivation even if farming later resumes. He said fertile cropland was disappearing as commercial fish ponds and concrete structures spread with weak regulatory oversight.

A regional coordinator of the Bangladesh Resource Centre for Indigenous Knowledge (BARCIK), a research and development organisation, told BSS that much of the lost high-yield land had become commercial fish ponds, because aquaculture offers faster and much higher returns than crops such as Boro rice. He said unplanned digging also disrupts natural drainage, alters the local microclimate and raises the risk of crop disease, and that fish traders from Rajshahi were moving into neighbouring districts where land leases were cheaper.

Digging a pond on cropland is not supposed to happen without permission. In the BSS report of January 2026, the DAE's additional director in Rajshahi said that under existing regulations pond excavation on cropland requires prior approval from the deputy commissioner's office, after the upazila agriculture officer and the Soil Resource Development Institute have checked that the land is not highly fertile. He said joint efforts by the administration and all the departments concerned had become crucial to stop ponds being dug on arable land.

Rajshahi's deputy commissioner told BSS that approval is based on reports from an upazila-level committee of agriculture and fisheries officials, and that mobile courts and night-time drives were conducted regularly against illegal digging.

Water adds to the pressure on the land. A professor of geology and mining at the University of Rajshahi told BSS in December 2025 that a government gazette had declared 4,911 villages in 25 upazilas of Rajshahi, Naogaon and Chapainawabganj water-stressed for 10 years, following a decision of the 18th meeting of the National Water Resources Council, with restrictions on extracting groundwater for purposes other than drinking.

The mango, Mangifera indica, is considered by some authorities to be native to the eastern part of the Indian subcontinent, including Bangladesh, according to Banglapedia, the national encyclopaedia. Bangladesh has nearly 100 cultivars, and its superior varieties are grown mostly in Rajshahi, Chapainawabganj and Dinajpur. Among them are Fazli, Langra, Gopalbhog, Himsagar, Khirsapat, Ashwina, Lakshmanbhog and Mohanbhog.

Banglapedia notes that fruit setting suffers from fog, rain or cloudy weather in January to March, when the trees flower, and that storms and hail later in the season make young fruit drop. A grafted tree first bears fruit in about its fourth year and stays productive until about its 45th year. About three dozen insect pests attack mango in Bangladesh, among them mango hoppers, fruit weevils, stem borers and fruit flies, and fungal diseases such as anthracnose and powdery mildew also cause damage. The Bangladesh Agricultural Research Institute (BARI) runs mango research at centres including Rajshahi and Chapainawabganj.

Rajshahi region mangoes carry geographical indication (GI) status. The Khirsapat (Himsagar) mango of Chapainawabganj was certified in January 2019, the third Bangladeshi product to get a GI after hilsa and jamdani, on an application BARI filed for the district's growers, The Daily Star reported. Rajshahi received a GI certificate for the Fazli mango in October 2021; after farmers in Chapainawabganj challenged it, the Department of Patents, Designs and Trademarks decided in May 2022 that both districts would share the Fazli GI.

The region's orchards had been growing for years before the decline. BSS reported in July 2025, citing the DAE, that over 15 years paddy area in Rajshahi, Chapainawabganj, Naogaon and Natore had shrunk by 2 lakh hectares while land under mango orchards had doubled to 87,307 hectares. New varieties such as Amrapali and BARI Mango-3 and 4 drove the growth, and Naogaon had overtaken Chapainawabganj as the country's top mango-producing district. In Naogaon's Porsha upazila, a grower said new high-density orchards held up to 200 trees per bigha, against about 10 in traditional orchards, and were replanted after about 10 years.

For the 2025 season the DAE's district offices had set production targets of 2.60 lakh tonnes from 19,603 hectares in Rajshahi, 3.87 lakh tonnes from 30,300 hectares in Naogaon and 3.86 lakh tonnes from 37,504 hectares in Chapainawabganj, BSS reported. In February 2026 the DAE in Rajshahi put the district's 2024-25 output at 249,952 tonnes, with a production target of 246,000 tonnes for 2025-26.

Rajshahi district covers 2,425.37 square kilometres. It is bounded by Naogaon to the north, Natore to the east, Chapainawabganj to the west, and India's West Bengal, Kushtia district and the Ganges (Padma) to the south, and its land is made up of the Barind tract, diara and char lands, according to Banglapedia. Its main rivers are the Padma, the Mahananda and the Shiba. Agriculture is the main source of income for 59.35 percent of households, according to census-based figures in Banglapedia.

Chapainawabganj covers 1,702.55 square kilometres and is bounded by West Bengal on the north, south and west, and by Rajshahi and Naogaon on the east. Its five upazilas are Gomastapur, Nawabganj Sadar, Nachole, Bholahat and Shibganj, the largest. It became a district in 1984. Agriculture is the main source of income for 57.13 percent of households, Banglapedia says.

Much of both districts lies on the Barind Tract, the largest Pleistocene terrace in Bangladesh, which covers about 7,770 square kilometres. Its reddish-brown, compact Madhupur (Barind) clay sits higher than the surrounding floodplains, so it stays free of floods; about 47 percent of the tract is classified as highland. Rainfall averages about 1,971 mm, falling mostly in the monsoon, and the area is designated drought-prone. Because rain is the main source of groundwater recharge, Banglapedia notes, heavy withdrawals of groundwater have lowered the water table.

Deep tube wells installed from the mid-1980s under the Barind Integrated Area Development Project, later the Barind Multipurpose Development Authority (BMDA), opened the tract to dry-season irrigation and turned a food-deficit area into a food-surplus one, Banglapedia says. That history of irrigated rice, then orchards and then ponds is the background to the land-use change the DAE figures recorded in 2026.

Photo: Tanvir Rahat / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Sources: Jagonews24, Bangladesh Sangbad Sangstha (BSS), The Business Standard, New Age, The Daily Star, Banglapedia