How BFIDC is surviving the changing forest scene
To find out, we recently visited the corporation’s facilities in Kaptai upazila in the Rangamati district, which was the ‘mother project’ of the two-winged Bangladesh Forest Industries Development Corporation (BFIDC) and the first in the country
After Bangladesh's liberation, its first president, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, said in a speech, "We have people, we have forests. We will not remain poor."
This probably determined the fate of the country's forests.
All sorts of activities were implemented for at least the next two decades, centring on converting forests to wealth. Among them were clear-felling designated parts of forests in rotation, to extract timber and creating rubber monoculture on forest land.
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Bangladesh Forest Industries Development Corporation (BFIDC), under the Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change, was tasked with extracting wealth from forests.
Timber trees are still planted in the forests under a different arrangement, but clear felling has been prohibited since 1989. Under the pressure of legal and illegal logging, the forests have been terminally degraded.
Under these changing circumstances, a few sections of this corporation were shut down in the 2000s. How is the remainder doing? How are they surviving in the diminishing forest era? To find out, we recently visited the corporation's facilities in Kaptai upazila in the Rangamati district, which was the 'mother project' of the corporation and first in the country.
The corporation has two wings.
The agriculture wing is responsible for rubber plantation, and the industrial wing looks after lumber processing and furniture making. The furniture is made for and supplied to government agencies on demand. Interestingly, upon approval from appropriate authorities, government agencies do not need to float any tender to purchase products from BFIDC, making the purchase hassle-free.
As we got out of the facility, we saw a BFIDC-marked truck that had just got back from delivering a batch of furniture to a medical college hospital's dormitories. This signifies the uniqueness of the whole operation – from sourcing of the wood to making and delivering the furniture on its own.
BFIDC has 19 rubber plantations in three zones - Sylhet, Chattogram and Sherpur/Tangail. The corporation has eight industrial units in Dhaka, Chattogram, Rangamati and Moulvibazar, tasked with lumber processing, treatment and furniture making.
The BFIDC establishment in Kaptai has several facilities used for activities ranging from taking in the gigantic lumber and turning them into finished furniture and transporting them to the buyers.
At one corner of the complex, there is a bridge crane on the bank of Kaptai Lake, used for bringing the lumber to the sawmill. Once upon a time, there was also a crane to lift the lumber from vessels to the land, but the crane is no more, and the lumber now arrives at the facility through the roads instead of waterways.
There we saw lumber of a variety of trees such as rubber, teak, jarul, garjan, etc. According to Teertha Jit Roy, Assistant General Manager, Lumber Processing Complex (LPC), the source of these lumber is the seized trees that were being smuggled out of the forests, or got uprooted by the storms.
The rubber logs are from the corporation's rubber plantations. When the rubber trees reach the end of their lifespan, they are cut to make space for the next rotation of plantation. Rubber plants' lifetimes are 30 to 40 years.
After cutting the lumber into rough planks, the seasoning and treatment start. This is a three-step process where the planks are first put into the seasoning chambers. The moisture of the planks is removed here by applying heat. There are 16 such chambers in the facility.
After that, the planks are chemically treated so that insects are not attracted. As the planks get moist with chemicals, they undergo another round of seasoning to get the moisture out. These processes make the wood last for many decades.
Also, the pieces then resist shrinking or bending, as we sometimes notice in our furniture.
Witnessing the operations here made us realise why the furniture we buy from our everyday traders show cracks and deformities so often. While sawmills and furniture makers are commonplace all over the country, I actually never saw such a processing facility in all the towns I have been to in my entire life, marking the difference between the furniture made in BFIDC and the local makers.
The story of furniture giants, such as the famed brands, is different, of course.
Md Abu Hannan, Assistant Field Superintendent of the LPC, smiled when I shared this with him and said that local traders only dry the wood in the sun. Only a few millimetres of the planks are dried this way, leaving the rest vulnerable to disease and deformity.
One thing that struck us was that the chemical treatment facility does not have an ETP (Effluent Treatment Plant). The chemical-laden wastewater is disposed of in a pit, and some of it gets evaporated under the sun, according to Abu Hannan.
The wastewater, at least, does not reach the lake water, which would be devastating for the ecosystem. The sawdust and woodchips produced at the facilities are used in the boilers as fuel.
Inside the furniture-making facility, we saw modern equipment that cuts the wood according to design. BFIDC has its designers and catalogues of furniture from which the buyers can choose and order. The corporation can also make any design shown by the client.
The latest addition to the facility, a CNC machine, makes all the intricate designs on the wood possible. Here, the designer only loads the digital design onto the machine with a USB drive, and the machine does the rest. The unit manufactures chairs, office desks, benches, cabinets, doors, windows etc. The wood material is used according to specific demand.
The setup, the machines, and the work are quite impressive. The cuts made in the wood pieces are so perfect that if the grain patterns match when conjoined, it is nearly impossible to tell they are separate pieces, even before polishing and varnishing.
As we got out of the facility, we saw a BFIDC-marked truck that had just got back from delivering a batch of furniture to a medical college hospital's dormitories. This signifies the uniqueness of the whole operation – from sourcing of the wood to making and delivering the furniture on its own.
The various boards used in some furniture, of course, are collected from outside.
BFIDC, Kaptai had four components: lumber Extraction Unit (TEX), Procurement and Sales Organisation (PSO), Kaptai Industrial Estate (KIE), and Lumber Processing Complex (LPC).
"TEX had all sorts of resources - sea trucks, sea cranes, bulldozers, elephants – necessary to extract logs from the forests," said Teertha Jit Roy.
"Once logging in reserve forests was prohibited by the government, raw material supply to Kaptai BFIDC was drastically reduced. As a result, TEX, PSO and KIE were shuttered in 2005, and employees were given golden handshakes," he added.
Since then, BFIDC has been running on seized logs from different forests, the manager informed. Besides, they also collect lumber from the 19 rubber gardens owned by the corporation. In the past, rubber wood was used only as firewood.
This is how BFIDC avoided a complete closure.
In FY2023- 24, the rubber sector suffered a total loss of over Tk9 crore 38 lakh in the three zones. Apparently, two of the zones, namely Chattogram and Sherpur/Tangail, are making a profit but the loss incurred in the Sylhet zone is outweighing the profits.
The industry wing, however, is making a profit from its furniture sales. In the same fiscal year, it made a total profit of over Tk35 crore 66 lakh, making the corporation profitable despite the losses at the agriculture wing.
