The Farmer Card is a major initiative of the current government. Distribution of the card began at the pre-piloting stage on April 14, Bengali New Year’s Day. The formal launch of the Farmer Card program will now take place Sept. 17. Prime Minister Tareque Rahman will inaugurate the program as chief guest in Fulgazi upazila, Feni, according to the Ministry of Agriculture. Launch events will be held simultaneously in 50 districts that day, with incentive money to be distributed to 100,000 farmers nationwide. Of the 1.63 million farmers already registered, bank accounts have been opened for 100,000, the ministry said.
The Farmer Card has been designed as a digital identity card and an integrated channel for accessing agricultural services. Cards were previously distributed in pre-piloting to 11 blocks across 10 districts. The program is being expanded to cover not just crop farmers but various groups engaged in agricultural production, including fisheries and livestock.
Crop producers, sharecroppers, lease farmers, fish farmers and livestock farmers will all benefit from the card. Plans call for it to provide subsidies on agricultural inputs such as fertilizer, seed and pesticides, along with agricultural loans, irrigation, farm machinery, government incentives, crop insurance, training, and weather and market information. A QR code is also being added to the card in its main phase, to help identify cardholding farmers and simplify their access to government benefits — scanning the card will make it easy to identify the cardholder.
Of the 1.63 million farmers registered so far, bank accounts have been opened for 100,000. On the day of the launch, incentive money will reach nearly 100,000 farmers. In addition, information for another 500,000 farmers has been verified and approved for opening bank accounts. Under the card, landless, marginal and small farmers receive 2,500 taka in cash incentives along with other benefits.
The Farmer Card program is being run under the Agriculture Ministry’s “Programme on Agriculture and Rural Transformation for Nutrition, Entrepreneurship and Resilience in Bangladesh” project, funded by the World Bank, IFAD and the Bangladesh government and known in short as the PARTNER project.
According to PARTNER project data, 1.63 million farmers have been registered so far. About 96% of registered farmers are engaged in crop cultivation, 1.5% in fish farming, and about 2.55% in livestock rearing. Only 157 registered farmers, or 0.1% of the total, are salt farmers.
By land ownership, more than 43% of registered farmers are small farmers, holding between 50 and 249 decimals of land. About 40% are marginal farmers holding 5 to 49 decimals. About 8% are farmers with 0 to 5 decimals of land. Medium farmers holding 250 to 749 decimals make up 8.31%, while large farmers holding more than 750 decimals make up just 0.81%.
The Agriculture Ministry also says it aims to issue cards to 4.3 million farmers in the current fiscal year. According to the PARTNER project’s design document, the country has roughly 22.7 million farmers in total, but the government has set a target of distributing Farmer Cards to 4.3 million of them in the 2026-27 fiscal year. The remaining farmers will be brought under the program in phases.