SUKANTA HALDER
As people return to the capital after the Eid holidays, the Dhaka-Mawa-Bhanga Expressway is greeting travellers not with its usual green surroundings and fresh earthy air, but with an unmistakable stench: rotting rawhides.
After sacrificing cattle on Eid day, many people have dumped hides along the highway this year as prices continued their long decline.
Images of discarded hides, hides buried in the ground, and rawhides thrown into rivers first made national headlines in 2017, when tanneries began relocating from Dhaka’s Hazaribagh area to the Savar Tannery Estate. Nearly a decade later, the same scenes continue to recur with little sign of improvement.
The relocation from Hazaribagh, on the banks of the Buriganga river, came after years of delays by tannery owners and repeated government deadlines. International buyers had increasingly raised concerns about the industry’s environmental record. At Savar, tanners were supposed to receive a fully functional central effluent treatment plant (CETP), but the facility remains underperforming almost a decade after the move.
The Eid-ul-Azha season provides around 50-60 percent of the rawhide local tanneries need for production throughout the year. Proceeds from the sale of sacrificial animal hides traditionally go to charities, madrasas and orphanages.
For years, the government has fixed prices at which small traders are meant to buy hides from the public. Yet those rates have done little to change the overall picture.
Apart from official prices largely remaining on paper and the CETP incomplete, at least half a dozen other factors help explain why rawhides continue to rot each year.
They include a surge of rawhide supply arriving within a few days of Eid-ul-Azha, weak demand, a tannery sector struggling with environmental compliance, softer global demand for leather, cash shortages across the supply chain, poor preservation practices that reduce quality, and allegations of price manipulation by a small group of tannery owners.
Md Shaheen Ahamed, chairman of the Bangladesh Tanners Association, said the leather sector has been in decline since the relocation of tanneries to Savar.
There are now more than 115 operational tanneries in Savar estate, but only five hold Leather Working Group (LWG) certification.
The LWG is a global body that sets environmental and compliance standards for the leather sector. Certification is required for access to markets in Europe, the United States and parts of developed Asia.
Most local tanneries do not have this certification, due mainly to compliance issues and the underperforming CETP.
Ahmed said the industry cannot grow while it fails to meet international environmental and quality standards.
With most tanneries lacking certification, rawhide demand remains weak this year as usual, according to small and medium traders.
Md Anwar Hossain, a rawhide trader in the Posta area of Dhaka, said demand from tanneries is currently low.
He said the prices traders can offer are dictated by what tanneries are willing to pay.
“That is just how the chain works. An official price does not change that,” Hossain said, adding that markets do not move simply because the government puts out a number.
Tipu Sultan, general secretary of the Bangladesh Hide and Skin Merchants’ Association, said rawhide collection this year is around 20 percent below expectations, and trading has not followed the government’s price announcement.