Once, I saw four workers picking pineapples from an orchard in the Madhupur Sal Forest in Tangail—a commonplace scenario. But what was surprising about the pineapple field inside the 1,076-acre Shantoshpur Rubber Garden was that all the fruits had ripened in the field. It is a common practice to spray ripening hormones after harvest. However, in this case, like in many other fields, chemical hormones were sprayed a day or two before harvest. Growth hormones were also used.

I thought the fruits would be juicy and tasty, so I bought five. However, to my great disappointment, I found four completely rotten and inedible.

In recent history, the Madhupur Sal Forest has become famous for its pineapple, banana and papaya, which are grown in place of sal and other native trees. Since last year, the Bangladesh Forest Industry Development Corporation (BFIDC) has been officially leasing forest land for growing pineapple. Rubber gardens cover 7,503 acres of the forest land. Rubber plantation began here in 1986 on the forest land that the Bangladesh Forest Department leased to BFIDC. BFIDC then established these plantations by clearing sal forest patches. However, rubber plantation is seen as a death sentence for natural forests.

The history of rubber plantation in Bangladesh is not long. BFIDC has been involved in rubber plantation since 1962. Apart from them, small rubber farmers, the Chittagong Hill Tracts Development Board (CHTDB), and owners of tea gardens are also engaged in producing rubber. According to the Bangladesh Rubber Board, 140,000 acres of land across the country are used for this type of cultivation.

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Rubber: A death sentence to natural forests

One thing about rubber trees is that they can produce enough latex for up to 26 years. Then, the tree becomes unproductive. It is then cut down to make way for new plantation. In Madhupur Sal Forest, 110 acres of rubber trees were felled in 2023. Another 300 acres of trees were felled in 2024. This year, too, 51,869 rubber trees covering 450 acres are being cut down.

After felling the old trees, BFIDC plants rubber saplings and leases out the land for pineapple cultivation for three years. Large amounts of growth and ripening hormones are used for these pineapples. The result is inevitable health risks.

Dr Abu Naser Mohsin Hossain, divisional forest officer (DFO) of Tangail Forest Division, said that Madhupur has the highest number of cancer cases and disabled children in Tangail. He also said that 16 types of hormones and 16 highly toxic pesticides are used in the pineapple fields in the area.

Adding to the ecological disaster in the sal forest patches, social forestry projects have introduced exotic species such as eucalyptus and acacia on a very large scale. Social forestry is essentially a monoculture of exotic species, which has caused irreversible damage in Madhupur. After the first rotation of social forestry, the planting of eucalyptus was halted. But acacia has been massively planted throughout the forest in Madhupur and others in Chattogram, Cox's Bazar, and CHT.

Under the guise of social forestry, large parts of the forest have been encroached and converted into banana and pineapple plantations. According to the Bangladesh Bureau of Statistics (BBS), Tangail produced 120,352 tonnes of pineapples in 2016–2017, accounting for more than half of the country's total production. The majority of this yield came from the Madhupur Sal Forest. Government data from 2017 indicates that 16,575 acres of forest land have already been converted into pineapple orchards. With rubber plantations now being repurposed for pineapple farming, the cultivated area is expected to increase even further.

Commercial banana production in Madhupur is also extensive: 1,83,615 tonnes were produced in the Dhaka division in 2016-17, according to BBS. Of this, 92,888 tonnes were produced in Tangail district alone. The Madhupur Sal Forest is the centre of the district's banana cultivation.

Research findings conclusively show how rubber monoculture and other plantations, including social forestry, initiated and carried out with funding support from the Asian Development Bank (ADB), World Bank, USAID and other donor agencies, have destroyed a significant part of Madhupur Sal Forest and other forests that existed for hundreds of years. ADB withdrew from the forestry sector completely in 2005. The World Bank also shrunk its investment there. However, it came back with a $175 million project—Sustainable Forests and Livelihoods (SUFAL). This is the largest forestry project in Bangladesh. The project started in 2018 and ends this year.

Lately, the officials of the Forest Department have started acknowledging that the natural forests have been extensively destroyed due to social forestry and rubber plantations. The environment adviser and the Forest Department now say that planting acacia trees in the forest land was wrong. However, they do not admit that the co-management model was responsible for the massive destruction of natural forests.

Prof Mohammad Tanzimuddin Khan of Dhaka University carried out an in-depth study on co-management in five protected areas. His assessment of co-management in these places is that all stakeholders should have had equal participation in co-management. But in reality, influential local people in the co-management committees and councils influenced all the decisions. They protected their own interests more than protecting the forests.

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How forestry projects destroy forests

Co-management in protecting forests is undoubtedly controversial. Is the Forest Department now talking about protecting natural forests to hide mistakes made by itself, financial institutions and bilateral donors? Surprisingly, the Forest Department does not bring into discussion the restoration of natural forest with huge funding support from the World Bank under a project that has been going on since 2018. A senior World Bank official, requesting anonymity, recently said to this author that hardly 20 percent or less of the trees planted by the Forest Department to restore natural forests have survived, an indication that restoration of natural forest even within natural stands is challenging. Is the Forest Department's stated intention to restore natural forests unrealistic, then?

"Whatever is being said about protecting forests is ad hoc," said Md Yunus Ali, former chief conservator of forests. "In Madhupur and Gazipur, a clear and long-term plan must be taken to restore the sal forest. For that, everyone must work together," he said.

I respect the goodwill of the interim government and the Forest Department. But do they not know that at a time when the programme to remove nails from trees is being celebrated (the deputy commissioner of Sherpur inaugurated this programme with the Forest Department on March 12), more than a thousand workers are cutting nearly a thousand rubber trees every day in Madhupur? And tens of thousands of rubber saplings are being raised in the BFIDC nurseries to be planted this year.

This year, trees of the third rotation social forestry plots in Tangail and Gazipur districts are being cut down. The land emptied of trees will further lose its topsoil during the rainy season. The participants of social forestry are preparing to plant acacia seedlings again.

Natural forest is a key source of safe food. Forests provide us with materials for building and repairing houses, income and employment. However, if the soil and biodiversity of the forest are destroyed, we will eventually lose our key sources of survival. Our government has introduced a plantation economy to such a great extent that the rhetoric we have been hearing from the government high-ups and the forest officials does not seem realistic anymore. If they are honest, the right strategies must be formulated, and actions with the participation of all parties must be ensured. The underlying factors of deforestation must come under objective scrutiny, and those who have committed crimes against nature under the cover of plantation projects must be held responsible and stopped. It is a difficult task, but not impossible.

Saman Saad, Fahmida Rahman, Jidit Chakma, Probin Chisim and Rubel Mondol have assisted the writer in gathering information from the field.

Philip Gain is researcher and director at the Society for Environment and Human Development (SEHD).

Views expressed in this article are the author's own.

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