Bangladesh Has Started Growing Coffee, and the Numbers Are Rising Fast

Bangladesh's coffee output rose from 35 tonnes on 120 hectares in 2021 to 95 tonnes on around 2,000 hectares in 2025, almost all in the Chittagong Hill Tracts, alongside a cashew programme aimed at a $1 billion export market.

By the UISC BD Editorial Desk · United Information Service Center · Published 10 September 2026 · 6-minute read

Bangladesh is not a coffee country. It is a tea country, a rice country, a jute country.

It is also, as of the last five years, a coffee-producing country. Output rose from 35 tonnes on 120 hectares in 2021 to about 95 tonnes on roughly 2,000 hectares in 2025.

Where It Grows

Approximately 1,800 of those 2,000 hectares are in the Chittagong Hill Tracts.

Between 2021 and 2026, coffee saplings were distributed to around 2,000 farmers under a Department of Agricultural Extension project, with the strongest yields reported in Ruma, Thanchi and the Chimbuk hills of Bandarban.

The geography is not incidental. Coffee needs elevation, drainage and shade — conditions the flat Bengal delta cannot provide and the eastern hills can. This is a crop that fits a specific and comparatively small part of Bangladesh.

The Cashew Half

The same programme covers cashew, and the current position is modest: hill tract farmers produce only 1,600 to 2,000 tonnes a year.

The stated ambition is much larger. Industry and government assessments have argued that planting cashew on 200,000 hectares could generate more than $1 billion a year, and the government has framed coffee and cashew together as a $1 billion export market objective.

Readers should hold that figure at arm's length. It is a calculation of what a hundredfold expansion in planted area would be worth, not a projection of what will happen. Two hundred thousand hectares is a hundred times the current coffee area, in a region where suitable land is limited and contested.

The Nearer Targets

More useful are the shorter-range numbers, which are still ambitious relative to the base.

Initial coffee production is expected to reach around 1,000 tonnes annually by 2026-27, and government targets have pointed to 1,500 tonnes by 2030, worth roughly Tk 30 crore. Project leadership had earlier aimed at expanding cultivation to 10,000 hectares with production of 4,000 to 5,000 tonnes.

Comparing those figures shows the pattern clearly: earlier expansion targets were not met, and later targets were revised down. That is normal for a new crop programme and worth stating plainly.

The Environmental Objection

This is the part of the story that most coverage skips, and it deserves space.

Conservationists have raised substantive concerns about coffee expansion in the Bangladesh hills, warning specifically about monoculture replacing mixed hill ecosystems. The Chittagong Hill Tracts hold some of the country's last significant natural forest, and clearing biodiverse hillside for single-crop plantation trades one kind of value for another.

The resolution, where it has been applied elsewhere, is shade-grown coffee — which keeps canopy trees, supports birds and pollinators, and generally produces better beans. It is slower and yields less per hectare than full-sun plantation.

Whether Bangladesh's programme goes the shade route or the plantation route will determine whether this is a good story in ten years. We do not yet know, and we are not going to pretend the question is settled.

Why Diversification Here Makes Sense Anyway

Set the scale ambitions aside and the underlying logic holds.

Bangladeshi hill farmers grow crops with thin margins on land unsuited to rice. Coffee and cashew are perennial, high-value, storable and non-perishable — the opposite of the highly perishable fruit and vegetables that lose most of their value in Bangladesh's weak cold chain.

A sack of green coffee keeps for months and ships without refrigeration. For a remote hill farmer, that solves the logistics problem before it starts.

There is also a domestic market forming. Coffee consumption in urban Bangladesh has grown sharply, and locally grown beans have begun appearing in Dhaka cafés — the sort of provenance story that supports a premium, and the same commercial logic behind Bangladeshi speciality tea and the muslin revival.

The Reasonable Expectation

Bangladesh will not become a significant coffee exporter this decade. Ninety-five tonnes is what a mid-sized Ethiopian cooperative produces.

What is realistic is a viable domestic speciality industry, a genuine income improvement for a few thousand hill farming families, and a proven high-value crop for land that currently earns very little. Measured against that, the programme is working.

Related reading

• Third in Vegetables, Sixth in Potatoes: Bangladesh's Farming Numbers
• Bangladesh's $3.2 Billion Poultry Industry Supports 8.5 Million Jobs
• Bangladesh Is a Top-10 Mango Producer and Now Ships to 38 Countries
• Bangladesh Is the World's Third-Largest Rice Producer

Sources

• "A cup of coffee, grown closer to home," The Daily Star — thedailystar.net
• "Coffee, cashew cultivation expands under DAE project," The Daily Star — thedailystar.net
• "Bangladesh moves to enter global cashew nut market," The Business Standard — tbsnews.net
• "As coffee expands in Bangladesh hills, conservationists worry about ecosystems," Mongabay — news.mongabay.com
• "Ctg farmers achieve landmark coffee harvest, eyes set on export potential," The Business Standard — tbsnews.net