Agriculture in Bangladesh: Output, Farm Structure and Food Security

Bangladesh is often described as an economy transformed by garment factories and remittances, but its fields still carry the country. In FY2024-25 the broad agriculture sector — crops, livestock, forestry and fisheries — produced 11.62 percent of GDP, according to the Bangladesh Economic Survey 2025, a share that has been shrinking for decades as industry and services grow faster. Employment tells the opposite story: the Bangladesh Bureau of Statistics' Labour Force Survey of 2022 found that 45.33 percent of all employed people, some 32 million workers, work in agriculture, a share that had actually risen from 40.6 percent in 2016-17. No other sector comes close as an employer. What happens on Bangladesh's farms therefore decides whether its poorest households eat, earn and survive shocks — and increasingly, whether its crowded cities are fed at stable prices.

The weight of the sector today

Within the sector, crops dominate, but the animal economy is substantial. Fisheries contributed 2.43 percent of GDP and livestock 1.80 percent in the mid-2020s, on ministry figures, and together they supply most of the animal protein in a diet still short of it. Total food grain production reached 50.35 million tonnes in FY2024-25. The sector's output is squeezed out of a fixed and slowly shrinking land base by intensity rather than area: the Agriculture Census of 2019 recorded a national cropping intensity of 214 — meaning the average plot grows more than two crops a year — up from 173 in the 2008 census. That intensification, built on irrigation, fertiliser and short-duration seed varieties, is the central fact of Bangladeshi farming.

Rice: the road to near self-sufficiency

Rice is grown in three seasons. Aus, the smallest crop, is sown in the pre-monsoon months; Aman, planted with the monsoon rains and harvested in November–December, remains the largest by area; and Boro, the irrigated dry-season crop, is now the largest by output. In FY2024-25, according to final BBS estimates, farmers harvested 40.6 million tonnes of clean rice: a record 21.3 million tonnes of Boro, 16.5 million tonnes of Aman and 2.79 million tonnes of Aus. The total was marginally below the previous year's 40.7 million tonnes, because floods cut the Aman crop and Aus planting shrank — a reminder that even now the harvest is hostage to the weather. In paddy terms, FAOSTAT data make Bangladesh the world's third-largest rice producer, with 60.6 million tonnes in 2024, behind only China and India.

Two revolutions produced these numbers. The first was seed: high-yielding modern varieties bred by the Bangladesh Rice Research Institute (BRRI) now cover about 82 percent of the rice area, replacing low-yielding local varieties across most of the country. The second was water. Dry-season Boro rice is only possible with irrigation, and irrigation in Bangladesh runs overwhelmingly on groundwater: the Bangladesh Agricultural Development Corporation (BADC) puts groundwater's share of irrigation coverage at about 72 percent, against 28 percent from surface water, delivered mostly by well over a million privately owned shallow tubewells alongside deep tubewells and low-lift pumps. In the dry north-west, the Barind Multipurpose Development Authority's deep tubewells turned a drought-prone tract into a rice surplus region. The achievement is real — a country that suffered famine in 1974 and imported grain for decades now broadly feeds 170 million people from its own fields — but it is not absolute. After the floods of 2024, the FAO put Bangladesh's rice import needs for calendar 2025 at about 1.8 million tonnes, above the recent average. "Self-sufficiency" in rice means sufficiency in a normal year, with imports as the shock absorber in a bad one.

A farming structure of tiny plots

The Agriculture Census of 2019 counted 16.88 million agriculture-based households — 46.6 percent of all households in the country — up from 15.18 million in 2008. But the land each household farms keeps dividing. Total arable land recorded by the census fell from 19.1 million acres in 2008 to 18.68 million acres in 2019, lost to housing, industry, roads and river erosion, while inheritance splits holdings among sons in every generation. The result is a farm structure of very small, fragmented plots, often scattered in several parcels, farmed with family labour and rented machinery. Alongside the cultivating households, the census counted 9.2 million households dependent on agricultural wage labour — the landless and near-landless workers who plant and harvest other people's crops and who are the first to go hungry when prices rise. Smallness is not only a constraint: tiny plots are farmed intensively and carefully. But it caps incomes, complicates mechanisation and credit, and means that a single failed season can push a household into debt.

Beyond rice: the other crops

Jute, the historic cash crop, remains a major earner. BBS figures put production at 89.5 lakh bales in FY2024-25, down about 6.6 percent on the year after poor weather — though the Department of Agricultural Extension's separate estimate was far lower, a reminder that even official crop numbers can diverge. Bangladesh is usually described as the world's second-largest jute producer after India and its largest exporter of raw jute and jute goods; on FAO tonnage data for 2024 it actually produced more jute than India. The full story is told in our profile of the Bangladeshi jute industry.

Tea is a smaller, steadier success. The Bangladesh Tea Board recorded production of 94.93 million kilograms in 2025 from 172 gardens — below the record 102.92 million kilograms of 2023, but enough to meet about 97 percent of domestic demand; exports, at 1.64 million kilograms, are now a sideline, as our Bangladeshi tea industry profile explains.

Potatoes and vegetables have quietly become volume crops. Potato output hit a record 11.5 million tonnes in FY2024-25 — more than the country can eat, store or export, with consequences examined below. Year-round vegetable production from homesteads and small plots supplies the country's wet markets, and mango, the signature fruit, yields an estimated 24–25 lakh tonnes a year against domestic demand of 18–20 lakh tonnes, according to the DAE — yet exports were only about 2,200 tonnes in FY2024-25, blocked by weak grading, packing and cold-chain capacity rather than by any shortage of fruit.

Livestock, poultry and fisheries

The livestock economy has grown from a backyard sideline into an industry. Department of Livestock Services figures put milk production at 15.54 million tonnes in FY2024-25, meat at 8.95 million tonnes and egg production at 24.4 billion eggs; by FY2025-26 output had risen further, to 15.75 million tonnes of milk, 9.07 million tonnes of meat and 25.1 billion eggs. Official claims of self-sufficiency need care, however. In July 2026 the fisheries and livestock minister told Parliament that milk production of 15.54 million tonnes still fell short of demand of 16.23 million tonnes, and Bangladesh imports about 1.18 lakh tonnes of milk powder a year at a cost of roughly Tk 4,000 crore. The same ministry's adviser conceded in August 2025 that even daily egg output of about six crore pieces did not fully meet demand. Meat comes closest to genuine self-sufficiency; milk and eggs remain tight, and commercial poultry depends on imported feed ingredients.

Fisheries are the quiet giant. Total fish production reached 5.11 million tonnes in FY2024-25, with about 61 percent now coming from pond aquaculture rather than capture — a structural shift as river and marine catches stagnate; the marine share of production has fallen to about 11 percent. FAO data rank Bangladesh second in the world in freshwater fish production. The sector's emblem is the hilsa, whose own production has lately been falling from its FY2022-23 peak — a warning covered in depth in our article on hilsa, the national fish of Bangladesh.

Mechanisation and the subsidy state

None of this output comes cheap to the state. Bangladesh holds fertiliser prices far below import cost, and the FY2025-26 budget set aside Tk 17,241 crore for fertiliser and other input subsidies within the agriculture ministry's allocation — one of the largest single subsidy lines in the budget, and one that balloons whenever world prices spike. Support also flows through cheap agricultural credit, free seed and fertiliser distributions after disasters, and machinery subsidies. Under Phase III of the Agricultural Mechanisation programme (2020–2024), the government distributed 35,347 subsidised machines, including 8,912 combine harvesters, paying 50 to 70 percent of the retail price — a response to rising rural wages and seasonal labour scarcity that made hand-harvesting the bottleneck of the Boro season. Delivery has not been clean: an IFPRI study reported in November 2025 found that 28 percent of the subsidised combine harvesters could not be traced in the field, a finding officials dispute but which captures the governance challenge that runs through farm support — the state is generous, but its aim is imperfect.

When plenty hurts: the 2025 potato crash

The risks of success without markets were demonstrated by potatoes in 2025. Encouraged by high prices the previous year, farmers planted more land and harvested a record 11.5 million tonnes in FY2024-25, against annual demand that official sources put at between 9 and 10.4 million tonnes. Cold stores filled, and by July–August 2025 farm prices had fallen to Tk 13–14 per kilogram — below the Tk 14–17 it cost to grow the crop and far below the Tk 20–25 per kilogram full cost once storage was counted. By late October, wholesale prices were Tk 9–12. On 6 November 2025 the government abandoned a plan to buy 50,000 tonnes through the Trading Corporation of Bangladesh and instead approved Tk 260 crore in direct cash support, paid by mobile money to 2,032,363 verified potato farmers — the episode is documented in our report on the Tk 260 crore potato subsidy. The lesson generalises: Bangladesh has largely solved production; its weak points are storage, processing, price information and export channels, so surpluses become losses and farmers respond by planting less the next year, sowing the next shortage.

Climate pressure on the farm

Agriculture is where climate change lands first. In the south, salinity is advancing inland: the Soil Resources Development Institute's 2024 soil salinity map records 11.56 lakh hectares of saline-affected land, up from 10.56 lakh hectares in 2009 and 8.33 lakh hectares in 1973, with about 68 percent of cultivable land in the coastal districts now affected to some degree — a slow emergency examined in our article on climate change in Bangladesh. In the north-west, the same groundwater that made Boro possible is being drawn down: in the Barind Tract, the water table fell from about 8 metres before 1990 to about 18 metres by 2021, and BADC's own targets — raising surface water's share of irrigation to 30 percent by 2030 — concede that the current balance cannot hold. Between the two extremes come the floods: the 2024 monsoon floods that cut Aman and Aus output are the recurring third blow. Adaptation is under way — salt-tolerant and short-duration rice varieties from BRRI, floating gardens, re-excavated canals — but it is racing a moving target.

Food security: what Bangladesh still imports

Measured in calories from its staple, Bangladesh is food-secure in most years. Measured across the whole diet, it is one of the world's great food importers — the FAO noted in 2023 that Bangladesh ranked third among food-importing countries by value, behind only China and the Philippines. The gaps are structural. Wheat is the largest: domestic production of about 1.0–1.1 million tonnes covers barely an eighth of consumption of about 7.7 million tonnes, and imports were 6.14 million tonnes in FY2024-25 alone. Edible oil is the second gap: more than 70 percent of requirements are imported as soybean and palm oil, at a cost of over US$2.89 billion a year on SAARC Agriculture Centre and BBS estimates. Milk powder, pulses, spices, sugar and fruit fill out a list that exposes food prices to the exchange rate and to Black Sea and Southeast Asian harvests — as households learned when global prices spiked in 2022.

Outlook

The agenda for the next decade follows from the diagnosis. Production of the staple is broadly secured; the unfinished work is diversification into higher-value crops and livestock without losing the rice base, water discipline as aquifers fall, storage and processing so that gluts stop bankrupting growers, and subsidy reform that protects small farmers without leaking machines and fertiliser to the untraceable. Looming over all of it are land loss and a changing climate. A sector that still employs 45 percent of workers while producing under 12 percent of GDP is also, by definition, where Bangladesh's low incomes are concentrated — which is why, long after it stops being the largest part of the economy, agriculture will remain the largest question in it.