The agriculture ministry has ordered the implementation of the “Fertiliser Dealer Appointment and Retention Policy 2025 (revised)” to ensure an uninterrupted and orderly supply of fertiliser to farmers.
To that end, an office order signed by additional secretary Ahmed Faisal Imam was issued on Sunday by the ministry’s Fertiliser Management and Monitoring Department.
Under the order, each upazila must now have at least nine dealers to distribute urea and non-urea fertiliser, with scope to increase the number based on the district’s demand and level of agricultural production. The policy says the district committee will take the necessary steps in appointing dealers, on the recommendation of the upazila agriculture officer and the district dealers’ cooperative. New dealers are required to have their own warehouse, godown and the service centre needed to sell fertiliser.
In renewing existing dealers’ licences, the area’s demand, the district-wise quota and fulfilment of the policy’s conditions will be taken into account. In farmers’ interest, the district committee will also set fair prices for dealers. To ensure proper implementation, regular monitoring has been ordered at upazila, district and divisional levels. Any dealer who violates the policy or breaches set conditions will have their dealership cancelled, the order says.
Those concerned may submit applications within the set time, and detailed information on the policy is available on the agriculture ministry’s website. The order says the revised policy has been taken up to bring transparency and accountability to fertiliser management and to get fertiliser to farmers on time.
The revised policy abolishes the “unregulated” sub-dealer, or retail fertiliser-seller, system, under which government-appointed BCIC dealers had sold fertiliser to farmers at the grassroots. As a result, the licences of several hundred thousand “unregulated” retail fertiliser sellers appointed at ward level across the country will be automatically cancelled.
For a long time, two state bodies — BCIC and BADC — appointed separate fertiliser dealers to sell to farmers. BADC dealers received comparatively small allocations against demand, causing anger and frustration among them. The revised policy scraps that separate arrangement and introduces a single, integrated dealer system, so there will be no split into “BCIC dealer” or “BADC dealer.”
The policy also ends the option of appointing more than one fertiliser dealer in the same family. So where a single family holds more than one BCIC or BADC fertiliser-dealer licence, it will be cancelled.
Under the revised policy, domestic fertiliser producers under the industries ministry — TSP complexes or urea-producing plants — as well as private importers of non-urea fertiliser and the transport contractors of government fertiliser, must ensure supply directly to dealers or at the upazila level.
বাংলায় মূল প্রতিবেদন পড়ুন · Read the original Bengali report