Bangladesh has signed a memorandum of understanding with China on exporting jackfruit, agreed during Prime Minister Tarique Rahman's recent visit. Agricultural economists and people in the export trade say the move brings the process to the point of formal approval.

Mahdi Amin, spokesperson for the prime minister's office, said 17 memoranda of understanding were signed between Bangladesh and China during the visit, covering infrastructure, disaster management and the digital economy as well as the purchase of jackfruit from Bangladesh. Reducing the trade deficit between the two countries was a priority of the trip, he said.

China's interest is not new. In May 2025, when China began importing raw mangoes from Bangladesh for the first time, the Chinese ambassador in Dhaka also expressed interest in fruit such as jackfruit and guava.

The market is substantial. Although jackfruit is chiefly an Asian fruit it has a market worth billions of dollars worldwide. Global jackfruit exports were worth 2 billion US dollars in 2012 and had risen to 3.7 billion dollars by 2023. Vietnam, Thailand, the Netherlands, China and Ecuador together account for 60 percent of world exports.

For all its farming, Bangladesh has not gone far in agricultural exports, specialists say. Dr Mohammad Amirul Islam, dean of the faculty of agricultural economics and rural sociology at Bangladesh Agricultural University, said: "Our total agricultural exports are still not very good. Most of what we export goes to the ethnic market."

Quality is the barrier. "Because quality is not maintained in agricultural products, we still have not been able to enter the European market much," he said. An ethnic market means one built around a particular community or culture — in practice, expatriate Bengali buyers.

Specialists also see obstacles ahead. Bangladesh lacks the domestic capacity in quality control, processing and packaging that exporting jackfruit or jackfruit products would require. Even so, they believe that opening the Chinese market would create new possibilities not only for jackfruit but for other Bangladeshi farm products as well.

Source: BBC Bangla