Bangladesh loses up to Tk3,500 crore worth of potatoes each year due to unsold surplus production and post-harvest losses.
In the absence of a farm-to-fork good agricultural practices (GAP), the country has long been failing to tap the full potential of the export market for this highly demanded tuber crop, thereby failing to help its farmers in benefitting from their surplus production.
However, things appear to be changing for the better.
The Ministry of Agriculture (MoA) with assistance from development partners is trying to develop a GAP protocol and hopes to tap the full potential of the export markets soon.
Farmers from the northern region of Rangpur are now producing export-quality potatoes by using good agricultural practices (GAP), a collection of principles for safe and healthy farming and processing.
A partnership between the Shara Bangla Krishak Society (SBKS), a national network of farmers’ organizations, and the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), under the Missing Middle Initiative project, brought about this success. The project provided GAP training to 100 farmers through four cooperatives. The farmers also received pre-production, inspection, and post-harvest assistance.
More than half of the farmers were women.
FAO organized a pre-season buyer-seller meeting for officials from the Bangladesh Potato Exporters’ Association (BPEA) to meet smallholder potato farmers recently. Officials from the BPEA liaised with foreign buyers to get specifications and orders.
As a result, the potato producers have grown 450 metric tons of Santana potatoes, a high yielding Dutch commercial variety. The producers were also able to procure seeds from the exporters at an affordable price. They also grew Diamant, Cardinal, Granola, and Asterix varieties which are in high demand in Malaysia, Nepal, Sri Lanka and countries in the Middle East and North Africa.
The agriculture ministry, through the Department of Agriculture Extension (DAE) and the Bangladesh Agricultural Development Corporation (BADC), has been supporting potato producers in increasing exports since 2019.
According to DAE, more than 480,000 hectares of land were under potato production this year. The yield will be more than 11 million metric tons (MT), but domestic demand for potatoes is only about 7.7 million tons. Of the surplus, only around a quarter can be stored for sale.
Therefore, the loss of the farmers due to unsold surplus production and post-harvest losses is estimated as anything between Tk2,500 crore and Tk3,500 crore ($290-400 million). In order to prevent this significant loss, the government is now encouraging potato exports.
There are, however, challenges such as meeting export protocols of importing countries, lack of sufficient quantity of preferred varieties, lack of farmer awareness of export quality potato varieties, and finding ways to produce potatoes without quality issues such as hollow hearts, brown rot, or insects.
To address these challenges, formulation of a Bangla GAP policy is almost complete, and work is underway to set up advanced laboratories to meet exporters’ sanitary and phyto-sanitary requirements.
Export scenario
Bangladesh stands 7th in the world in potato production with over 2.5 million to 3 million tons of exportable surplus. But the country managed to tap hardly two to three percent of its export potential. It earned only USD 51 million by exporting 55,000 tons of potatoes in the 2020-21 financial year. As a result, carryover potato stocks in cold storages act as a disincentive for growers, who often complain of low price offers they get during peak harvesting season.
As the Bangladeshi exporters failed to maintain GAP and exported substandard potatoes in the very first export volume to Russia back in 2014, they lost that potential market the very next season. After that initial volume of 100,000 tons of potato imports Russia stopped buying from Bangladesh.
Only after its recent invasion of Ukraine, Russia made an announcement that soon it would resume potato imports from Bangladesh.
During a recent potato export inauguration event, FAO representative in Bangladesh Robert D Simpson said: “In order to truly thrive, the potato export value chain requires a productive alliance between all involved—the government, private sector, and producer organizations. Bangladesh has a lot of potential to grow commercial and export varieties of potatoes and we are working closely with the Ministry of Agriculture to boost potato exports in order to strengthen food security and increase incomes for farmers and farming communities.”
FAO’s Missing Middle Initiative project has also supported potato producer cooperatives to establish virtual call centres which help the cooperatives buy inputs and sell their produce.
Salma Akhter Adury, a virtual call centre operator at Birhim IAPP Farmers’ Cooperative Ltd, in Rangpur's Mithapukur, described at the event how she landed an order by sending photos of potatoes. She said: “I sent photos of our Santana variety potatoes to the exporters. The exporters were impressed with the high quality and we received an order for more than 200 metric tons for our cooperative from two exporters.”
Arif Azad Prince, managing director of MASAWA Corporation, an agro-processing and export company, said the combined efforts of the government, FAO, exporters and producer cooperatives had ensured a strong export supply chain.
“Potato producer cooperatives ensured the use of good agricultural practices to grow quality potatoes and collectively sell potatoes to our company. We offer a fair price to the farmers and our importers get shipments as desired. The result is that Bangladesh’s potato value chain has a strong reputation among all stakeholders,” he said.