The lack of proper post harvest management technique and processing technology also hinders the growth of the sector, experts say.

"On average, 33 percent of fruits and vegetables produced in Bangladesh are wasted from harvesting to processing," said Mahfuz Ashek, a consultant and horticulture expert working with Agro-based Technology Development Project (ATDP).

But the situation was worse only six years or so ago when around 40 percent fruits and vegetables used to rot. The emergence of Pran, a local agro-based food processing company, helped reduce the percentage of agro products waste.

"Today, not a single pineapple grown in this country rots," claimed Amjad Khan Chowdhury, CEO of Pran Group, which has production facilities in 10 locations. The company exports processed fruits and vegetables to more than 30 countries.

"We are the biggest food processors in Bangladesh, meeting more than 60 percent of the domestic market demand with fruit juices, snacks, tomato sauces, vinegar, soft drinks, pickles, peanuts and many more," Chowdhury said. "We provide fair prices to the farmers."

According to Mahfuz Ashek, there is a huge potential demand in the domestic as well as international markets. Bangladesh could become very competitive due to its cheap labour cost and abundant raw materials.

"Thailand is producing and exporting lots of dehydrated agricultural products," he cited an example, which Bangladesh can follow.

But Bangladesh could have done better had there been long-term policies to increase the farm production. "We are not getting adequate supply from our own plantations," said the Pran CEO, "while the population grows."

Pran plans to expand its export business, too and it has started sending salespeople abroad to develop relationships with locals. But visa complexities are stalling the efforts.

A major problem facing Pran today is the unusual low prices of Chinese goods. "We do not know how they fix their prices. We can only guess that their price structure is manipulated," Chowdhury complains.

Pran wound up some businesses like processed mushrooms for soups and canned baby corn because of the price pressure: the latter due to a lack of tin cans which Bangladesh are failing to produce in sufficient quantities. Importing cans from Thailand costs a lot, which makes it all the more hard to compete with the Chinese products.