Why boro rice matters

In the middle of April, much of rural Bangladesh is caught up in the same rush. Combine harvesters roar across the haors, courtyards fill with paddy being threshed and dried, and prices for the new crop are haggled over at every haat. In Dhaka, officials at the food ministry watch the fields just as closely, because the grain brought in over these few weeks decides how rice prices will behave for the rest of the year, how full the government stores will be and whether imports will be needed. The crop is boro.

Boro rice is central to Bangladesh's agriculture and its economy. It secures the country's food, raises farm incomes, creates work in the villages and supports economic growth. Here, one by one, are the reasons this single season matters so much.

Boro supplies the largest share of the country's rice. According to preliminary Bangladesh Bureau of Statistics (BBS) figures reported in the press, total rice output in the 2023-24 fiscal year passed 40 million tonnes for the first time, and about 21 million tonnes of it came from the boro season. In other words, more than half the nation's rice comes from this one crop; another estimate puts the share at nearly 55 per cent.

That year boro covered about 4.88 million hectares. A single crop grown over so vast an area, carrying the staple food of nearly 170 million people, is the country's biggest food-security question. When boro does well, markets stay calm; when it fails, prices climb, and the burden falls hardest on low-income households, who spend a large part of their earnings on rice.

One measure of how much rice prices shape ordinary lives is food inflation. The same Daily Star report noted that even in 2023-24, a year of record output, food inflation rose to 10.65 per cent from 8.71 per cent the year before. Higher production is no guarantee of lower prices, but there is little doubt that prices would have climbed further had production fallen.

Boro's weight shows most clearly in the import figures. According to The Daily Star, rice output in the 2023-24 fiscal year grew by 4.1 per cent, the fastest growth in six years and the fifth consecutive annual rise. That year Bangladesh imported no rice at all, against about 1.06 million tonnes the year before.

In the same report Wais Kabir, a former executive chairman of the Bangladesh Agricultural Research Council, attributed the growth to farmers switching to modern, high-yielding and hybrid varieties. M Asaduzzaman of the Bangladesh Institute of Development Studies cautioned, however, that production had not risen as much as reported, arguing that high rice prices pointed to a supply shortfall. Questions of this kind about the production statistics have been raised by experts repeatedly.

The following year looked very different. Sudden floods in the southeast in August and September 2024 badly damaged the aman crop, destroying about a million tonnes of paddy in the Chattogram, Sylhet and Mymensingh divisions. Rice imports in 2024-25 rose to 1.436 million tonnes, a seven-year high. Estimates of that year's boro crop differed: the Department of Agricultural Extension (DAE) put it at 22.6 million tonnes, the US Department of Agriculture at 20.5 million. Annual demand for rice is put at about 38 million tonnes.

Set side by side, the two years make one point. When aman or aus is hit by floods, boro is the main buffer against the shortfall. A good boro crop eases the pressure to import and saves foreign exchange; if boro fails too, the country has to lean on foreign markets, where neither price nor supply is under its control.

Bangladesh harvests rice three times a year: aus before the monsoon, aman in late autumn after the rains, and boro at the start of summer after the winter. Boro is grown through the winter and cut as summer begins. A few months after the aman harvest, just as stocks of that crop are running down, new boro paddy reaches the market.

This keeps rice production continuous through the year. One season's crop arrives before the last one runs out, so there is no big gap in supply. Without boro, the country would have to live for a long stretch of each year on stocks and imports alone.

Boro depends on irrigation, and that is its great strength. Aman relies heavily on rain; if the monsoon arrives late or breaks off halfway, yields suffer. Boro's water is pumped from tube wells, rivers and canals, so the whims of the rain matter much less.

Over the decades since independence, shallow and deep tube wells and pumps have spread across the country, and boro is now grown in almost every region. The sight of water being pumped from the Gomti river onto fields in Cumilla is a picture of that irrigation revolution. As irrigation improved, boro spread, and the country's rice output grew with it.

The strength has limits. Heavy pumping of groundwater is lowering water tables in some regions. The Bangladesh Rice Research Institute (BRRI) therefore promotes alternate wetting and drying, a method in which fields are not kept flooded all the time but irrigated again only after the soil has dried somewhat. According to BRRI's Rice Knowledge Bank it saves about 15 to 30 per cent of irrigation water without reducing yield. Careful use of water is now essential if boro is to keep its place.

It pays in money terms too. The Business Standard has described it as a method that cuts paddy irrigation costs by 20 to 25 per cent. Research has identified massive groundwater extraction for boro as the main cause of falling water tables, especially in Rangpur Division, now a national concern, and researchers note that the method could be applied across the roughly 4.8 million hectares of irrigated boro land.

The boro season is dominated by high-yielding varieties, so it produces more rice from the same land, with a potential of 5 to 8 tonnes of paddy a hectare. The dry season brings more sunshine and less cloud, and the farmer controls the water, so the crop can come close to its full potential.

For many years the two leading boro varieties were BRRI dhan28 and BRRI dhan29. As their yield potential has declined with age, BRRI has introduced new varieties. According to published reports, BRRI dhan89 averages close to 8 tonnes a hectare in the field, half a tonne to a tonne more than BRRI dhan29. The faster new varieties reach farmers, the more rice the same land will give.

Among the newer varieties, BRRI dhan88, released in 2018, matures in 140 to 143 days and can yield about 7 tonnes a hectare. Early-maturing varieties like this are especially useful where the crop must be in before early floods, or where farmers want to fit in another crop after boro. Balancing high yield against a short life is now the central aim of boro breeding.

Boro production feeds directly into farm incomes. For many farming families it is the biggest cash harvest of the year. The money from selling it repays debts for fertiliser, seed and irrigation, pays for children's schooling and house repairs and funds the next season, while a large part of the family's own rice for the year is kept back from the same crop.

To help farmers get a fair price and to build up public stocks, the government buys paddy and rice directly every boro season. In the 2025 boro procurement drive it announced prices of Tk 36 a kilogram for paddy and Tk 49 for rice, with targets of 350,000 tonnes of paddy, 1.4 million tonnes of parboiled rice and 50,000 tonnes of sun-dried (atap) rice.

Two kinds of rice are involved. Parboiled rice is made by soaking paddy, steaming it and drying it before milling, and it is what most Bangladeshis eat; atap rice is milled from paddy dried without parboiling. The government buys paddy directly from farmers and rice from mill owners.

According to food ministry figures reported in the press, the drive collected 376,942 tonnes of paddy, 1,406,533 tonnes of parboiled rice and 51,307 tonnes of atap rice, which the ministry described as the highest procurement in the country's history. Those stocks later feed food-support schemes, open-market sales and other assistance programmes.

Higher boro production also opens the possibility of exporting rice and earning foreign exchange. Rice from high-quality paddy can be sold on international markets, adding to the country's foreign earnings.

The reality, though, is that Bangladesh still grows rice mainly to feed itself and imports rice in years of shortfall. Exports are currently limited largely to aromatic rice, and only within quotas approved by the government. Aromatic rice exports were suspended entirely in the 2022-23 fiscal year and resumed in 2025 with approvals issued in phases. For the export potential to become real, the country first has to meet its own needs and build a regular surplus, and raising boro yields is the key to that.

Growing, tending, irrigating and harvesting boro takes a huge amount of labour. Preparing seedbeds, pulling and transplanting seedlings, weeding, applying fertiliser, running pumps, cutting, bundling, threshing and drying all need hands. The crop thus guarantees seasonal work for rural people, above all landless farm labourers.

The work is not only in the fields. Pump owners and operators, fertiliser and seed dealers, the boats and trucks that move paddy, and the workers of rice mills and drying yards all depend on boro for their income. At harvest time, labourers from many areas travel in groups to distant districts, the haors among them, to cut the crop.

Times are changing. As workers move to the cities and other jobs, many areas face labour shortages at harvest, especially during spells of continuous rain when the crop must be cut fast. That is why combine harvesters, which cut, thresh and clean in a single pass, are spreading. The government has offered a 70 per cent subsidy for such machines in haor areas and 50 per cent on the plains.

Combine harvesters do more than fill the labour gap. In the haors, where the crop must be brought in within days before an early flash flood, they save both time and grain. But the machines are expensive and hard to run in mud and low-lying fields, and press reports note that the subsidy has not resolved every difficulty with their spread.

Improved boro varieties can cope with drought, salinity and disease, which helps farming withstand the effects of climate change. In coastal areas, salt builds up in soil and water during the dry season, harming ordinary rice, and BRRI has bred salt-tolerant boro varieties for this land.

One is BRRI dhan67. According to BRRI it tolerates salinity of 12 deciSiemens per metre at the seedling stage and 8 over its whole life, yielding 3.8 to 7.4 tonnes a hectare depending on the salt level. Before it, BRRI dhan47 was selected as a salt-tolerant boro variety through trials in farmers' fields. Thanks to such varieties, part of the coastal land that once lay idle in winter now grows rice.

Disease resistance matters just as much. Research shows BRRI dhan28 and BRRI dhan29 were badly hit by blast disease in the 2017 boro season. Spreading new, disease-tolerant varieties is therefore about reducing risk as well as raising yields.

Boro is where modern technology is used most intensively in Bangladeshi farming: irrigation pumps, high-yielding seed, balanced fertiliser, pesticides and now harvesting machines. The boro field is, in effect, the largest testing ground for the modernisation of the country's agriculture.

New methods are usually tried first in boro, because there the farmer controls both water and timing. Water-saving irrigation was first field-tested in Bangladesh at BRRI in 2005, in the boro season. In this way the crop drives the modernisation of farming.

By keeping rice available in the market, boro production underpins social stability. When rice prices jump, poor families eat less and discontent grows; adequate production lowers that risk.

With food in store, floods, cyclones and other disasters are less likely to turn into food crises. The paddy and rice bought into government stores during the boro season become the main source of relief and open-market sales when disaster strikes.

The opposite has also been seen. In 2017 early flash floods drowned vast areas of boro in Sunamganj and the other haor districts before the crop had ripened. The Department of Agricultural Extension (DAE) estimated that about 200,000 hectares went under water and about 600,000 tonnes of crop were lost. Press reports put the haors' share of national boro output at about 20 per cent, so losses there are felt in the food situation of the whole country.

In the haor wetlands of Sylhet, Sunamganj, Habiganj, Moulvibazar, Netrokona and Kishoreganj, boro matters even more. Through the monsoon these vast low basins lie under water for months and grow nothing. When the water drains away in winter the same land is planted with boro, and for many farming families it is the only crop of the year: their food, their loan repayments and their children's schooling all hang on it. An early flash flood from heavy rain upstream in late March or April can drown ripe or half-ripe paddy within days, which is why embankment repairs are watched anxiously each year. Shorter-duration varieties, timely embankment work and machines that harvest fast are the three defences most often urged.

Taken together, boro holds a unique place in Bangladesh's food security, economic development and farm production. It supplies more than half the country's rice, keeps supply steady through the year, reduces drought risk, creates farm income and rural work, and builds the food stocks the country relies on in times of disaster.

Keeping it that way calls for several things: careful use of groundwater; new higher-yielding and more tolerant varieties in place of the old ones; timely embankment repair and faster harvesting in the haors; and fair prices for farmers. With good management and better technology boro output can rise further, and the whole country stands to gain.

Photo: Pump irrigation from the Gomti river, Cumilla, Mohammed Tawsif Salam / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)