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Published on September 9, 2026
Official assertions of plenty clash directly with field-level exploitation, revealing deep governance challenges in the newly elected administration.
While thousands of desperate farmers block major highways across Rajshahi and Kurigram, the newly elected BNP government maintains a surreal stance: there is no fertilizer crisis. The Prime Minister’s Information and Broadcasting Adviser recently reassured the nation that fertilizer stocks are entirely sufficient. Yet, on the ground, agricultural fields tell a starkly different story, one of artificially manipulated shortages, extortionate retail markups, and total administrative inertia.
Bangladesh's Fertilizer Crisis: How Deep Does It Go?
This sharp disconnect between official press statements and rural reality exposes a critical governance failure. The administration appears incapable of enforcing basic market discipline, permitting politically connected dealer syndicates to hoard essential inputs while vulnerable farmers pay the ultimate price.
No fertiliser shortage, some miscreants creating artificial crisis: Agriculture minister
Data from the Ministry of Agriculture and the Bangladesh Chemical Industries Corporation (BCIC) show that national stocks of urea, TSP, DAP and MOP stood at roughly 1.3–1.65 million tonnes in late August, narrowly above the July–September demand of 1.321 million tonnes. Stocks are therefore adequate for the ongoing planting season; the crisis is not caused by a genuine national deficit.
Bangladesh fertiliser stocks fall below safe levels
Yet farmers report empty dealer points and open-market mark-ups of Tk 300–700 per 50 kg sack. Urea, officially fixed at Tk 1,350, routinely sells for Tk 1,650–2,150, with TSP and DAP following the same pattern.
Under the official system, licensed BCIC dealers receive fixed monthly allocations to sell at government-regulated rates. Reports from across the country, however, indicate that many dealers are diverting stock to the black market or simply closing warehouses to create artificial scarcity and push prices higher.
Dealers blamed for creating artificial fertiliser crisis
Fertiliser prices soar amid ‘artificial crisis’
The mechanism is straightforward. Dealers delay lifting their allocated quotas from government warehouses or divert subsidized fertilizer to retailers and black-market channels. Ministry sources have identified irregularities among roughly 2,300 of the country’s nearly 10,000 dealers. In Kurigram’s Bhurungamari, more than 200 farmers broke open a warehouse on 23 August and took nearly 10,000 kg of urea after hours of waiting. Similar raids and road blockades erupted again in early September in Rowmari and Nageshwari.
“There is fertiliser if you pay extra; if you do not, there is none,” said Mizanur Rahman, a farmer from Unhat village in Dupchanchia. In Lalmonirhat’s Kaliganj, Latif Uddin needed five sacks for his 10 bighas of Aman rice; the dealer gave him one. He paid Tk 350 extra per sack on the open market, and alleged dealers were “secretly selling fertiliser to retailers instead of farmers at government-fixed prices.”
Who benefits? Local dealers with political connections, many of them party activists or beneficiaries of the new administration’s patronage networks. The BNP government has suspended a handful of licences and imposed a few fines, but the pattern persists. Monitoring remains reactive, mobile courts sporadic, and distribution data opaque. When farmers protest, officials arrive, make promises, and leave the underlying cartel intact.
This is not a technical glitch. It is a governance failure. Domestic fertilizer plants produced only 1.106 million tonnes in FY2025-26 against a demand near 6.6 million tonnes, largely because gas shortages have idled most state-owned factories. Import dependence has soared above 70 percent, exposing the country to Middle East disruptions and Chinese export curbs. Yet the more immediate scandal is the inability of the BNP administration to enforce its own rules against dealers tied to its local structures.
Gas crisis deepens country’s reliance on fertiliser imports
Claims that the government is incapable of handling crises ring true here. It cannot restrain its own activists and interest groups from exploiting subsidized inputs. The result is a dual market: official stocks that exist on paper and a parallel market that extracts rent from the poorest farmers. Ordinary citizens feel the squeeze through rising rice prices and eroded rural purchasing power. The broader deterioration is visible in the breakdown of trust; farmers no longer believe official statements, and the state appears captive to the very networks it should discipline.
Roads Blocked, Fires Set in Kurigram Over Fertilizer Demands
If this artificial input crisis continues, the broader agricultural economy faces severe downstream consequences:
Lower crop yields: Inadequate fertiliser use is projected to cut per-hectare yields of major crops such as rice and maize by 12–18%.
Rising food costs: Reduced domestic output will increase dependence on expensive food imports, straining foreign-exchange reserves and driving up prices for ordinary consumers.
Deepening rural debt: Small farmers who take high-interest loans to buy fertiliser at inflated prices face mounting financial distress, reducing their capacity for future investment.
Don’t let the artificial fertiliser crisis persist
The BNP government may continue to deny the crisis. Farmers in Kurigram, Lalmonirhat, Jhenaidah and Rajshahi already know better. They are paying the price in cash, in time and in lost harvests while dealers and their political patrons profit. Paper stocks and ministerial assurances will not fertilise fields. Only decisive action against the artificial shortage, and the political protection that sustains it, can. Until then, Bangladesh’s farmers will keep breaking down warehouse doors because the system has left them no other choice.
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