Every mango season, Sheikh Shahdath Ali insists I witness the first mukul.
He holds the tiny blossom in his palm as if it is the most consequential event in Bangladesh that morning and perhaps, for him, it is. I have walked his orchards in Digoliya, Khulna, for years, often reluctantly, listening to him describe soil, smell and timing with the intensity of someone who has never doubted his purpose. He is nearly 70. His energy compounds. Mine does not.
He did not begin as a farmer. He was a marketing professional for some of Bangladesh’s most recognised consumer groups—Meghna, Fresh and City—a man who understood supply chains, consumer behaviour and the distance between a product and its customer. His wife, a government college professor, moved across districts as the system required. He followed. Then, somewhere between a posting and a promotion, he stopped following the system and built his own.
He started with four or five mango trees. People laughed. Today he owns multiple orchards, hundreds of trees and a reputation that brings government officials and international buyers to his farm. More importantly, he transformed behaviour. Land that once lay idle is now covered in mango orchards. He did not just grow mangoes. He reshaped a local economy.
Then came the shift that matters most. His son, Rakib, took the harvest online.
Today, nearly 60 per cent of Sheikh Shahdath Ali’s annual mango sales, worth around Tk10 lakh, are made directly to consumers through digital platforms. No middlemen. No syndicates. No dholan.
Rakib did not protest the system. He bypassed it.
This is not just a family story. It is a working model.
Agriculture employs 38 per cent of Bangladesh’s workforce and contributes 11 per cent of GDP. Yet inefficiencies remain deeply embedded. Mango production alone sees significant losses—less than 1 per cent exported, nearly 30 per cent wasted post-harvest—and farmers retain far less than the final consumer price due to fragmented supply chains.
I have paid Tk80 per kilogram for watermelon in Dhaka. The farmer who grew it was not paid per kilogram. He was paid a lump sum, often negotiated before harvest, often against informal credit from the same trader who later dictated the price.
This is not a market. It is a trap dressed as a value chain.
Only around 30 per cent of smallholder farmers have access to formal financial services. The rest depend on informal lenders. Bank loans take months. Farming does not wait.
So the farmer borrows from the trader and the trader sets the terms.
The system that should protect the farmer instead locks him into dependency.
This persists not because solutions are absent, but because they are fragmented. Bangladesh has digital payments, but not integrated marketplaces; marketplaces without financing; financing without agricultural data.
They exist but remain disconnected from the farmer’s reality.
This is not a failure of technology. It is a failure of design.
What Bangladesh needs is a National Agricultural Platform—not another scheme, not another card, but a unified digital infrastructure that connects farmers to markets, services and finance through a single verified identity.
Farmers onboard through eKYC linked to the national ID. Their production history, location and transactions form a digital profile. Government depots act as collection nodes, ensuring transparent pricing and instant digital payments through MFS.
Around this core, a service marketplace emerges.
Farmers can book irrigation equipment, tractors, drone spraying and transport through a single platform, comparing providers, prices and availability in real time. Each transaction generates data, improving access to credit and informing national planning.
Imagine a farmer in Rangpur starting his day by checking crop prices on his phone, booking a tractor, securing input financing and confirming a buyer, all before noon.
Every element of that morning already exists in Bangladesh. What does not exist is the system that connects them.
This is where fintech must evolve—from enabling transactions to enabling production.
Bangladesh Bank’s eKYC infrastructure is already deployed. bKash has demonstrated high repayment rates in nano-credit. Parametric micro-insurance can protect against climate shocks. Micro-savings aligned with harvest cycles can stabilise income.
These are not theoretical tools. They exist but remain disconnected from the farmer’s reality.
The market has already validated parts of this model. Startups have proven direct-to-consumer agriculture, embedded finance and crop-based investment. What Bangladesh lacks is not innovation—it is integration.
Such a system could enable participatory agriculture. Urban consumers and investors could fund production in advance, track crops digitally and receive both produce and returns after harvest.
A garment worker in Mirpur investing in a watermelon farm in Rajshahi. A diaspora family backing an orchard in Khulna. The farmer receives capital before the season. The investor receives returns from real production. Trust is ensured not by a startup but by national infrastructure.
Bangladesh is one of the world’s largest mango producers. We are not lacking the crop, the demand or the digital rails.
What we lack is the decision to connect them.
This is not about digitising agriculture. It is about redesigning its economics.
Sheikh Shahdath Ali built his platform one tree at a time. His son, Rakib, proved the digital layer works.
What Bangladesh owes its 16 million smallholder farmers, who have no Rakib, no recognition and no direct access, is a system that does for all of them what one orchard already proved possible.
The orchard was always a platform. It is time the country builds one for the millions who never had a Rakib.
Writer is a digital banking and fintech strategist working at the intersection of financial inclusion, platform economics and digital transformation in Bangladesh, and author of From Cash to Code. Views expressed are solely those of the author.
