Every few months, the Bangladeshi kitchen becomes the front line of a national crisis. As the retail price of onions climbs toward the 150-Taka mark, a familiar ritual begins in the corridors of power and the pages of our newspapers. The debate inevitably centres on a single, frantic question: Where will the onions come from? We look toward India with anxiety, then pivot toward Pakistan, Turkey, China, or Egypt, searching for a savior in a shipping container. We celebrate the arrival of a few thousand tonnes from abroad as if it were a diplomatic victory, yet we remain trapped in a cycle of volatility that seems to have no end. This national obsession with sourcing and diversification is a convenient but dangerous distraction. It allows us to ignore a far more uncomfortable truth: Bangladesh does not have a production problem; it has a systemic failure. We are literally throwing away our food security, losing more onions to decay every year than we import from our neighbours.
To understand the scale of this failure, one must look at the hard, cold mathematics of our fields. Bangladesh’s annual demand for onions sits at approximately 3.8 million tonnes. Our farmers, through sheer grit and increasing yields, now produce nearly 3.5 million tonnes. In a perfect world, the gap is negligible, a manageable 300,000 tonnes that could be easily covered by seasonal imports. However, we do not live in a perfect world; we live in one where nearly a third of our harvest never reaches a consumer’s basket. Between the moment an onion is pulled from the soil and the moment it reaches a kitchen in Dhaka, roughly one million tonnes of produce quietly disappears. It rots in humid piles, sprouts under tin roofs, or is crushed in the back of open trucks. This missing million tonnes is the ‘silent shortage’. We aren’t importing to feed a growing population; we are importing to replace what we have allowed to perish through negligence.
The irony of this situation is that our ‘crisis’ is actually born out of a moment of abundance. In March and April, during the peak harvest season, the market is flooded. Because the onion is a seasonal crop and our storage infrastructure is practically non-existent, farmers face a ‘sell or smell’ dilemma. They must offload their entire harvest immediately, regardless of the price. This leads to a predictable price collapse, where the very people who grow our food are forced to sell at or below the cost of production. For the farmer, the onion is a liability that starts to die the moment it leaves the ground. Without access to drying platforms or ventilated sheds, they pile their produce in open yards or under plastic sheets, hoping for the best. In our climate, where the harvest is immediately followed by the rising heat and humidity of the pre-monsoon season, that hope is a poor strategy.
The biological reality of the onion is that it requires ‘curing’, a process where the outer layers are dried to create a natural seal. Without this, the onion retains too much moisture, becoming a breeding ground for fungal rot and bacterial decay. In Bangladesh, most onions skip this crucial step. What follows is a slow-motion disaster. As the onions are moved from the village to the city, they are packed into suffocating jute or plastic sacks and stacked high on trucks that bounce over broken roads for hundreds of kilometers. The bruising and heat generated in these conditions accelerate the spoilage. By the time a consignment reaches the wholesale markets of Chattogram or Sylhet, the ‘Million-Tonne Rot’ has already taken its toll.
Government policy, unfortunately, has acted as a blunt instrument rather than a surgical tool in managing this mess. Instead of addressing the structural rot in our logistics, authorities have historically relied on trade controls. When prices spike, import permits are issued in a panic. When farmers protest the resulting price crash, those permits are halted. This ‘policy whiplash’ creates an environment of total uncertainty. Traders, unsure if they will be able to import next month, hike prices to cover their risks. Farmers, seeing the volatility, become hesitant to invest in better seeds or tools. This is not market management; it is a cycle of reaction. A supply chain that leaks 30 percent of its output can never be made resilient by simply switching suppliers.
The human cost of this failure is immense and unfairly distributed. The farmer suffers first, selling at rock-bottom prices because they cannot afford to wait. The consumer suffers later, paying exorbitant prices during the lean season. Even our trade relationships become strained; when we suddenly ban imports to protect our farmers, we leave produce from neighbouring countries rotting at border points, turning trade into a zero-sum game of resentment.
What makes this situation particularly galling is that the solution is neither exotic nor prohibitively expensive. We often assume that the answer must be high-tech, multi-million-dollar cold storage facilities. But onions are not potatoes; they do not need deep refrigeration. In fact, standard cold storage can often do more harm than good if not managed perfectly. Countries with climates similar to ours, such as Egypt and Turkey, have mastered the art of onion longevity using relatively low-cost, ventilated warehouses that control humidity and airflow. If Bangladesh could cut its post-harvest losses from 30 percent to even 10 percent, we would effectively ‘save’ 700,000 tonnes of onions annually. This is significantly more than our average annual import requirement. By simply fixing the ‘leak’ in our bucket, we would achieve self-sufficiency without planting a single extra acre of land.
The lack of progress in this area is not a technical failure; it is an institutional one. Currently, no one ‘owns’ the problem of post-harvest loss. Smallholder farmers lack the capital to build ventilated sheds, and the private sector, the large FMCG and retail groups that have transformed other parts of our food economy, has largely remained a spectator in the onion market. We need a national investment plan that shifts the focus from the border to the warehouse. This means providing tax incentives for private firms to build regional storage hubs, offering low-interest loans for farmers to build curing platforms, and improving the specialised transport logistics required to move perishables without destroying them.
The time has come to stop looking at the onion crisis as a foreign trade problem. It is a domestic infrastructure failure. Diversifying our import sources from India to Pakistan or Turkey might provide a temporary bandage, but it will never heal the wound. Foreign supply is inherently fickle, subject to the whims of weather, war, and the domestic politics of other nations. True resilience is homegrown, and it starts with the realisation that the cheapest, most reliable onion we can find is the one we have already grown and then allowed to rot.
The writer is a Port Shipping & Logistics Strategist, and Adjunct Faculty, Bangladesh Maritime University
