C T Online Desk: Traditional rawhide business in the Posta area in Dhaka has been waning over the years as tanners collect skin directly from the seasonal merchants through their agents across the country.
“The industry is split into multiple areas as tanners shifted to Hemayetpur. Outside Dhaka, a new industry is growing in Natore. In most of the cases, tanners are procuring skin directly from merchants through different agents,” Aftab Khan, president of the Bangladesh Hide and Skin Merchants’ Association, told Daily Sun.
The government has set-up Savar Tannery Industrial Estate (STIE) in Hemayetpur to help the country’s tannery industrial estate get rid of pollution stemming from rawhide processing.
In Bangladesh, Eid-ul-Azha accounts for half of the rawhides that tanners collect throughout the year. The rawhide businesses claimed that there is no chance to smuggle rawhide as the local traders offer “good prices” to meet the demand of the growing leather industry.
“The wholesale merchants in Posta have already processed 70 thousand units of cattle skin with salt. We hope the number will reach 150 thousand units this year, higher than 140 thousand of last year,” Khan said.
This year, there have been slaughtered 10.04 million sacrificial animals of which 4.5 million was cow, 4.8 million goats. The businesses in Posta collected rawhide of only 2.5 percent of cattle slaughtered.
According to the rawhide businesses, the seasonal merchants dominate the market.
There are different stakeholders in the rawhide industry including – merchant, agent, wholesaler and tanners. The wholesale merchants and agents collect skin from the retail merchant and tanners procure salted skin from them.
Last year, the price of rawhide in the capital’s largest rawhide store was Tk 800, but the leather of that shape is being sold at the retail level for Tk 1050.
The government fixed the rate of salted rawhide of cows at Tk 50-55 per square feet for Dhaka and Tk 45-48 outside Dhaka.
In the July-May period of the outgoing fiscal year 2022-23, Bangladesh exported leather and leather goods worth $1.12 billion, registering a year-on-year growth of 0.42 per cent.
