Fuel, Food, Medicine: Why India Is Bangladesh’s Most Critical Emergency Supplier – OpEd |
When global container freight rates quadrupled between 2020 and 2022 and port backlogs added weeks to standard transit times, Bangladesh discovered something its trade policy had never formally acknowledged: the supply chains it had built for normal conditions were not built for abnormal ones. Pharmaceutical raw materials and industrial inputs ran short or were delayed. Industrial inputs stalled at distant ports. Food commodity prices climbed as disrupted sea lanes pushed costs higher across every import category. The country that could reach Bangladesh fastest, by road, in days, was the one sharing its border.That fact has not yet been translated into policy. It should be.Bangladesh imported active pharmaceutical ingredients worth hundreds of millions of dollars annually from China and India in the years preceding the pandemic. When Chinese factories shut and global logistics fractured, the Indian share of that supply took on an outsized importance. Indian manufacturers, despite facing their own domestic disruptions, restored cross-border land deliveries quickly once restrictions eased. A truck crossing at Benapole or Petrapole can move pharmaceutical materials from Indian production centres to Dhaka in under two days in optimal conditions. No ship from Shanghai or Rotterdam comes close to that.The pharmaceutical dependence is structural. Bangladesh’s domestic drug industry, one of the strongest in South Asia, produces........