"If I had got good prices for dragon fruit, I could have become a real dragon. But the coronavirus won't let me become a dragon. Because of the lockdown, traders cannot come. So I have to sell with the help of local traders and friends, even at somewhat lower prices."

This is how Toyo Mro, a grower at Basanta Mro Para in the Chimbuk hills, described the problems of selling the dragon fruit from his orchard last Wednesday. Toyo Mro is not alone: dragon fruit growers are all more or less disappointed at not getting the prices they hoped for because of the lockdown.

Toyo Mro won the 2018 Prothom Alo Agriculture Award as a model grower.

Working in his orchard, Toyo Mro said he had taken a vehicle of fruit to the Bandarban market at dawn and was now back in the orchard picking dragon fruit again. The next morning he had to send another 500 kg of dragon fruit to a company in Chattogram, so there was no time to sit idle. Prices may be low, but there is no choice but to sell.

Toyo Mro said dragon fruit sold for Tk 300 to 350 a kg last year. This year the big ones are going for Tk 200 to 250 and the small ones for Tk 100 to 150, and even then buyers are hard to find. If he could sell the 14 to 15 tonnes from July's second harvest at a good price, he would get Tk 30 to 35 lakh. But if the current market holds, he thinks it will be hard to get even Tk 10 to 12 lakh.

Basanta Mro Para lies a kilometre in from the Bandarban-Chimbuk road in Sadar upazila. Beside the para is Toyo Mro's huge dragon fruit orchard. On about 2 acres, all 2,200 dragon fruit posts are bearing more or less fruit. The orchard looks like a thorny cactus forest with red among the folds of green.

Toyo Mro's wife, picking dragon fruit with a thurung (basket) hanging on her back, said they had to pick 14 to 15 mon of fruit every day. Weighing the fruit at night, loading it onto the vehicle before dawn, then picking again in the morning is very hard work, she said.

Dragon fruit has also yielded well in Thanchi upazila. Khamlai Mro, a grower there, said that with prices poor, he was not even covering his production costs. Traders do not go there because it is far away. He is hoping for better prices once the lockdown ends.

KM Nazmul Haque, deputy director of the district agriculture extension department, said Toyo Mro was the pioneer of dragon fruit cultivation in the district, and cultivation is now increasing every year. Two years ago it was grown on 40 to 45 acres. Now about 580 tonnes of dragon fruit are produced on some 125 acres in Naikhongchhari, Thanchi and Lama upazilas as well as Bandarban Sadar upazila.

He said that although there is demand for dragon fruit in the market, it cannot reach consumers because of the coronavirus situation, so growers are not getting prices. Toyo Mro is able to sell because he has good connections, but many others have not been able to sell at all. Prices will return once the lockdown is lifted, he said.

Source: Prothom Alo. First published in Bengali on The Agro News.