Junayed Habib
University of Middlesex
Across the markets of Dhaka, a quiet crisis is unfolding at the vegetable stall. Shoppers who once filled baskets now reach for half-measures, rationing purchases not from choice but from necessity. Vegetable prices across Dhaka’s retail markets are holding firm between Tk 80 and Tk 120 per kilogramme for most items, with green chillies surging to Tk 160 per kilogramme. These numbers are not anomalies but the new normal for households has already stretched thin.
The price pressure is attributed to a convergence of crop damage from continuous rainfall, rising transport costs driven by higher fuel prices, and the end-of-season withdrawal of several vegetable varieties from supply chains. Traders report that procurement volumes have halved, and customers who purchased one kilogramme are now buying half. The human cost is direct and personal. “Prices of one vegetable or another are rising almost every day,” said a customer in a Ray Saheb Bazar. “As a person with a limited income, it has become difficult to manage household expenses” (The Daily Star).
What appears at first glance as a seasonal supply disruption is a symptom of deeper and more chronic policy failures. Bangladesh has no robust system of agricultural price stabilisation for vegetables. Unlike rice, which benefits from procurement buffers and public distribution schemes, the vegetable subsector operates almost entirely at the mercy of spot-market dynamics. When rainfall damages crops or fuel costs rise, there is no institutional buffer to absorb the shock before it reaches the consumer’s basket.
The transport cost problem is a direct consequence of unresolved energy pricing policy. As fuel prices remain elevated, the cost of moving vegetables from production zones in districts such as Bogra, Jessore, and Narsingdi to Dhaka’s wholesale markets rises in lockstep, adding a structural premium to every kilogramme sold. Meanwhile, the near-complete absence of cold storage infrastructure along agricultural supply chains means that weather-damaged or seasonally surplus produce cannot be preserved and redistributed, compounding shortages at exactly the moments they are most damaging.
The regulatory framework governing wholesale and retail food markets is also weak. Middlemen operate with limited oversight, and the margin between farmgate price and retail price remains opaque and frequently exploitative. Small traders, who are simultaneously squeezed by higher wholesale procurement costs and falling customer volumes, are left with reduced margins and diminishing incentive to maintain supply continuity.
Remedies That Can Deliver Change
A credible policy response must operate on three levels simultaneously. In the short term, the government should activate emergency market monitoring mechanisms, deploy Trading Corporation of Bangladesh (TCB) trucks with subsidised vegetable sales in urban low-income areas, and consider a temporary fuel cost offset for agricultural transport vehicles to ease the logistics premium on food prices.
In the medium term, investment in decentralised cold storage infrastructure (particularly at district and upazila level) must be treated as a food security priority, not a development luxury. Cold chains would allow seasonal surpluses to be stored and released during shortage periods, dampening the price spikes that currently follow every crop disruption. Simultaneously, a Vegetable Price Stabilisation Fund, modelled on comparable mechanisms in neighbouring countries, could provide targeted support to smallholder vegetable farmers whose losses from weather events translate directly into the supply shortfalls consumers now feel.
Over the longer term, Bangladesh requires a comprehensive Agricultural Market Reform Act that mandates price transparency across the supply chain, brings wholesale market governance under independent oversight, and integrates climate risk forecasting into agricultural planning. Rainfall-linked crop damage is not an unpredictable event in Bangladesh; it is a recurring structural vulnerability. Policy must stop treating it as a surprise and start building the institutional architecture to manage it. Until it does, the shoppers of Dhaka will continue to count kilogrammes rather than choose freely.
