Anecdotal evidence suggests that despite Bangladesh’s significant success in agricultural productivity, farmers often do not receive a fair price for their produce and face difficulties in accessing the required raw materials for production due to a lack of appropriate backwards and forward linkages in rural market settings, especially in climate-vulnerable and hard-to-reach areas. To address this, the PPEPP-EU project has established ‘Agricultural Services and Marketing Hubs’ in its remote working areas to strengthen market linkage opportunities for local farmers, including PPEPP-EU members.
These hubs assist small and medium-sized farmers in organising their products, selling directly to regional or national market actors such as wholesalers and processing companies, and securing better market prices without relying on intermediaries.
Through these market centres, strong forward and backwards linkages are established between farmers, consumers, wholesalers and agricultural processing companies for selling farm products. This linkage also enables farmers to produce seasonal, high-value crops and other products in clusters, focusing on a demand-driven market and thereby reducing production risks.
In the market hub, farmers get the opportunity to discuss among themselves, and like-minded farmers can seek advice from lead farmers. They receive useful suggestions on crop cultivation, fish farming, and livestock rearing from relevant government officials, as well as PPEPP-EU’s technical officers. Additionally, they can access essential equipment, seeds, pesticides, fertilisers, technology, and agricultural advice for production from the same location.
To date, PPEPP-EU has established 237 market hubs that operate from dawn to dusk. These bustling hubs host spontaneous daily activities, with one or two pick-up vans transporting farmers’ products to sub-district or district markets, or directly to Karwan Bazar in Dhaka and across the country.
The market hub is an enterprise run by a PPEPP-EU member, with direct contributions from the PPEPP-EU project and involves over 100 farmers per hub. The hub entrepreneur also earns a reasonable income from selling farmers’ produce and agricultural inputs such as seeds and fertilisers.
“We are getting great responses from the local farmers as they sell their vegetables, fishes, milk, eggs, fruits and other produce from this hub all day long. Thanks to the market hub, farmers’ produce no longer spoils or rots and they get a fair price”, says Shamsuzzaman, husband of a PPEPP-EU member Khadiza Begum, who is a market hub entrepreneur at Karpasha Union of Nikli upazila in Kishoreganj.