Bangladesh’s fruit season is no longer just ‘a season’

For generations in Bangladesh, the appearance of fruit like mango followed a familiar calendar.

They arrived as summer intensified, filled markets through June and July and were largely gone by early August. For much of the rest of the year, fruit sellers turned to imported apples, oranges, pears and grapes.

That calendar is beginning to break down.

In the first week of September this year, fruit markets were still selling Katimon, Gourmati, BARI-4 and Ashwina mangoes. At least five or six mango varieties remained available weeks after the traditional season would have ended.

The change extends well beyond mangoes.

Papaya, guava, watermelon, pineapple, banana, pomelo and dragon fruit are now available for considerably longer periods, some throughout the year. Commercial cultivation of other locally produced fruits is also expanding.

Behind that shift is a long-running attempt by agricultural researchers and extension officials to solve a basic problem in Bangladesh's fruits supply…the country produced plenty of fruit, but much of it arrived at roughly the same time.

Historically, around two-thirds of locally grown fruit reached markets between May and August. During the other eight months, imported fruit filled much of the gap.

“Most of our fruits used to be supplied within just four months,” said Dr Babul Chandra Sarker, former chief scientific officer of the Fruit Division at the Bangladesh Agricultural Research Institute, or BARI. “For the remaining eight months, we had to depend on imported fruits.”

The response was not simply to produce more fruit. Researchers sought to change the calendar itself.

“We therefore focused on extending the production season of mango and other fruits and expanding varieties that can produce fruit throughout the year,” Sarker told Daily Waadaa.

How Bangladesh stretched the mango calendar

Mango offers perhaps the clearest example.

Until about a decade ago, locally produced mangoes were largely confined to the period between the final week of May and the first week of August.

Now some varieties can arrive as early as March or April, while others remain available into September.

BARI-11 can produce three crops a year, with harvests in March-April, May-June and July-August. Golap Khas and Govindabhog become available in Satkhira in April, while Baishakhi and Chaitri also mature around that time.

They are followed by the familiar summer succession: local Guti mangoes, Gopalbhog, Himsagar, Langra, Fazli, Haribhanga and Amrapali.

Most disappear by the first half of August. Then another group takes over. BARI-4, Gourmati, Ashwina, Ilamati, Katimon and Mayaboti can remain in markets until September. Katimon is now available almost throughout the year.

That sequence means the mango market increasingly resembles a relay rather than a single harvest season, with one variety replacing another over a much longer stretch of the year.

At several fruit markets in Dhaka last Sunday, around 18 to 20 kinds of fruit were on sale. They included mangoes, papaya, guava, watermelon, dragon fruit, pineapple, gab, Indian gooseberry, lotkon, pomelo, hog plum and rambutan.

For traders who remember the older market, September looks markedly different.

“Earlier, we could not even think of local fruits in September,” Hridoy Hossain, a fruit seller at Kawran Bazar told Waadaa. “Apart from the mango and jackfruit season, there were very few fruits available. Apples, oranges and grapes were the main fruits in the market during the rest of the year.”

“Now local fruits are available almost throughout the year,” he said. “People are cultivating them across the country.”

Production has risen alongside the longer selling season.

Bangladesh produced 15.1 million tonnes of fruit in fiscal year 2024-25, according to the Department of Agricultural Extension, up from 10.6 million tonnes a decade earlier — an increase of about 43 percent.

Seven crops — mango, jackfruit, banana, watermelon, papaya, guava and pineapple — account for about 83 percent of the country's fruit production.

Watermelon is now the largest by volume, at about 3.55 million tonnes in FY2024-25. Bangladesh also produced 2.662 million tonnes of mangoes, 2.534 million tonnes of bananas, 1.835 million tonnes of jackfruit, 775,000 tonnes of papaya, 664,000 tonnes of guava and 607,000 tonnes of pineapple.

Bangladeshis are eating more fruit as well.

The latest Household Income and Expenditure Survey cited in the report shows average daily fruit consumption rising from 35.8 grams per person in 2016 to 95.4 grams in 2022 — nearly tripling in six years.

The long experiment behind the change

The transformation visible in fruit stalls today began years before many of the new varieties became commonplace.

In 2009, the Agriculture Ministry launched the Integrated Quality Horticulture Development Project. The Department of Agricultural Extension, BARI, the Agricultural Marketing Department and the Bangladesh Agricultural Development Corporation worked through horticulture centres to introduce and expand varieties of mango, guava, dragon fruit and other crops.

When that programme ended, the government launched the Nutrition Development through Year-round Fruit Production Project in 2015.

Its central task was unusually specific: develop and spread fruits that could reach consumers during the months when traditional varieties did not.

“We wanted to find ways to make fruits available after August and before May,” said Mohammad Kamruzzaman, a former director of the Horticulture Development Project who later worked as a consultant on the year-round programme.

Around 2009, he told Waadaa, officials began experimenting with Thai guava. They also worked with sapodilla, dragon fruit, custard apple and sugar apple.

Researchers tried a similar approach with litchi, whose local varieties traditionally remained in markets for only a few weeks. Foreign litchi varieties were introduced to extend that period, while longan and varieties of rambutan were explored as fruits that could follow litchi into the market.

Some experiments took years to become commercially important.

Dr Md Mehedi Masud, who led the year-round fruit production project, recalled that Thai guava initially struggled to find buyers after it was planted experimentally on six bighas around 2009.

Seedlings were eventually produced from ripe fruit and cultivation spread. “Now we can eat Thai guava throughout the year,” Masud told Waadaa.

He estimated Bangladesh's guava market at 7,000-10,000 crore taka and said increased domestic guava production had reduced dependence on imported apples by at least 150,000 tonnes.

The mango expansion went further than planners expected.

“The mango season has expanded significantly,” Masud said. “At the beginning of the project, our projection for extending the mango season was much lower. It has increased three times more than what we had projected.”

The programme also changed production within the conventional mango season. Amrapali alone now accounts for about 35% of mango production, according to Masud.

Other crops followed different timelines.

Work on dragon fruit began in 2008, Masud said. It is now produced throughout the year, as are guava and papaya. Authorities have also promoted MD-2 pineapple, which he said has a shelf life roughly 10 times that of traditional local varieties.

Year-round jackfruit is being developed as well, though Masud estimated it could take another five years for the newer pineapple and jackfruit varieties to become widely available.

Pomegranate and pomelo production is increasingly extending across the year, while researchers have also worked with avocado and cashew nuts.

The next challenge is harder.

Bangladesh still has strong demand for imported grapes and oranges, two fruits researchers have not yet displaced in the way guava and mango varieties have begun to reshape other parts of the market.

“There is very high demand for grapes and oranges in Bangladesh,” Masud said. “We need to focus more on research into these two fruits. If we can do that, we will not have to depend on imported fruits.”

Agricultural officials say the effort to lengthen the domestic fruit calendar will continue.

“We are working to further increase the availability period of fruits,” said DAE Director General Md Abdur Rahim. “We are encouraging and advising farmers at different times to adopt new varieties for cultivation.”

The change is already evident in an ordinary fruit stall.

The old calendar has not disappeared. Himsagar still belongs to summer, as does Langra. Litchi still arrives in a rush and disappears quickly. But the months between those familiar seasons are no longer as empty as they once were.

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