About 800 papaya trees heavy with fruit were cut down overnight in an orchard at Noadam Brahmantila in Rangapani, ward 6 of Rangamati municipality, on the night of Thursday, 30 July 2026. When the orchard was visited on the morning of 31 July, rows of felled trees lay across a wide stretch of ground, almost every one still carrying green and half-ripe papayas. The incident was first reported by Jagonews24.
The most productive trees were targeted
The landowner, Ahmad Fazlur Rashid Selim, told Jagonews24 that a man named Khalil had leased about one acre from him and planted around 1,800 papaya trees. "Of these, the miscreants picked out and cut down the 800 trees that were bearing the most fruit," he said, adding that cutting down trees in fruit was "very painful and cruel for a farmer".
The orchard caretaker, Md Zahid, said he had gone to sleep after dinner and found a huge number of trees cut when he went out in the morning. The papayas on those trees, he said, were due to be sold within the next month. People involved with the orchard put the value of the ready-to-market fruit lost in a single night at several lakh taka.
No police complaint yet
"I cannot understand at all who did this disgraceful thing in the dark of night," the landowner said. The leaseholder and papaya grower, Md Khalil, was away from Rangamati at the time. The landowner said legal action would be taken once he returned, so as of 31 July no complaint had been filed with the police.
Commercial papaya farming had been growing in the hills
Rangamati is Bangladesh's largest district by area, at 6,116 square kilometres, and its economy rests mainly on farming: rice, maize and mustard alongside fruits such as mango, jackfruit and pineapple. Papaya was once grown mostly in courtyards for household use. A Dhaka Tribune report in 2020 found farmers in the district investing capital in commercial papaya because of good prices and high-yielding varieties, with traders from Dhaka, Chittagong, Sylhet and Barisal buying fruit in Rajasthali.
Production has risen across the country as well. Citing the Department of Agricultural Extension (DAE), The Business Standard reported that Bangladesh produced 492,000 tonnes of papaya in 2014-15 and about 900,000 tonnes in 2018-19, with the hill district of Bandarban second among producing districts. Two varieties dominate: Shahi, developed by the Bangladesh Agricultural Research Institute (BARI), and the imported Red Lady. Against that background, the loss of a fruiting orchard in one night was a heavy blow to a hill farmer.
Photo: Salim_Khandoker / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)
Sources: Jagonews24, Dhaka Tribune, The Business Standard, Wikipedia
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