Chittagong Port, April 2026: How Bangladesh Became Asia's Forgotten Bottleneck

Chittagong, Bangladesh — The container from Antwerp arrived on March 18. It carries Italian zippers, German thread, and Turkish buttons destined for a garment factory in Gazipur. By the time you read this, it will have been sitting in Chittagong port for 23 days. The factory already lost the order. H&M moved the contract to a factory in Ho Chi Minh City that can guarantee delivery.

Mosharraf Hossain owns that factory. He employs 1,200 workers, most of them women who travelled from villages in Mymensingh and Rangpur. In January, he had orders booked through August. By March, half were cancelled. By April, he began laying off workers. "They ask me when the fabric will arrive," he says, standing outside the factory gate. "I tell them it is sitting 80 kilometres away. I cannot get it out."

This is not a story about a single factory or a single shipment. This is what is happening across Bangladesh's $45 billion garment industry, which employs 4.2 million people and accounts for 84% of the country's export earnings. The bottleneck at Chittagong port — where the average container dwell time hit 11.3 days in March 2026, up from 6.8 days in 2023 — is costing the country an estimated $3.8 billion annually in lost orders, penalty fees, and manufacturer relocations.

What the Numbers Cannot Show

Walk through Chittagong's container yards and you will see what the port authority's statistics describe as "congestion." Containers are stacked seven high where regulations permit five. Truck drivers sleep in their cabs for three days waiting for clearance that should take six hours. Customs officers work in buildings without air conditioning, processing bills of lading on computers that crash twice a day.

Rina Begum used to work in Hossain's factory. She was a quality inspector, checking stitching on polo shirts destined for Target stores in the United States. She earned 18,000 taka per month — about $165. In March, she was laid off along with 340 others. She has two children. Her husband drives a rickshaw. "They told us the shipments are stuck," she says. "But stuck where? We do not understand these things. We only know there is no work."

How Bangladesh Built a Trap for Itself

Chittagong handles 92% of Bangladesh's seaborne trade. It was built to process 3 million twenty-foot equivalent units per year. In 2025, it handled 4.7 million. The government began planning an expansion in 2018. Construction started in 2021. The new terminal was supposed to open in December 2025. It is now scheduled for 2027, maybe 2028.

The delay has technical causes — land acquisition disputes, contractor bankruptcies, engineering revisions — but the deeper problem is institutional. Chittagong Port Authority is a public entity. It does not compete. It does not face market discipline. It reports to the Ministry of Shipping, which reports to Parliament, which is consumed by the political aftermath of the January 2024 elections and the ongoing constitutional crisis over the caretaker government's mandate.

Meanwhile, Vietnam opened two new deep-water terminals in 2024. India fast-tracked expansion at Chennai and Visakhapatnam. Indonesia attracted $2.1 billion in private port investment in 2025 alone. Bangladesh debated procurement rules.

What the Officials Say

Rear Admiral Mahbubul Islam, chairman of Chittagong Port Authority, acknowledges the delays but disputes the characterisation of crisis. "We handled 4.7 million TEU last year, up 8.2% from 2024," he said in a March interview. "Volume is growing. We are managing."

The Ministry of Shipping points to its investment programme: $4.2 billion allocated for port infrastructure through 2030, including the Bay Terminal project and dredging to accommodate larger vessels. "Bangladesh is building for the future," said Deputy Minister Khalid Mahmud Chowdhury in February. "Our competitors had decades to develop. We are catching up."

But catching up is not the same as competing. The problem is not capacity in 2030. The problem is lost orders in 2026.

The Geography of Delay

The delays compound. A container arrives from Shanghai. It waits four days for a berth. Unloading takes two days instead of eight hours because only 14 of the port's 19 gantry cranes are operational. Customs clearance, which should be electronic, requires physical inspection of 47% of shipments — a rate four times higher than Singapore or Dubai — because the customs authority lacks confidence in its risk assessment software.

Then the container must leave the port. The access road was built for 3,000 trucks per day. It now handles 7,200. Traffic jams last six hours. Truck drivers pay bribes at four checkpoints between the port and the Dhaka highway. The bribes are not large — 500 to 1,000 taka — but they are certain. Every driver budgets for them.

What Vietnam Understood

Vietnam's garment exports overtook Bangladesh's in 2024. The gap has widened in 2026. Vietnam exported $49.3 billion in apparel in 2025, compared to Bangladesh's $44.1 billion. The difference is not labour cost — Bangladeshi wages remain lower. The difference is reliability.

Vietnam attracted $23.7 billion in foreign direct investment in 2025, much of it in manufacturing. Investors cite infrastructure: modern ports, reliable electricity, digital customs systems. Bangladesh attracted $3.1 billion, most of it in energy. The Asian Development Bank's 2025 infrastructure assessment ranked Bangladesh 147th out of 180 countries for port efficiency.

Nguyen Thi Lan manages a garment factory in Binh Duong province, north of Ho Chi Minh City. She opened it in 2019 after managing a factory in Chittagong for six years. "I liked Bangladesh," she says. "Good workers, low costs. But every month we lost time because of port delays, electricity cuts, customs problems. In Vietnam, my container arrives on Tuesday. By Friday it is in my warehouse. I can plan."

The Workers Who Wait

Rina Begum has found new work. She cleans houses in Dhaka for 300 taka per day — about $2.75. It is less than half what she earned at the factory, and there are no guaranteed hours. Some days there is work. Some days there is not.

Of the 340 workers laid off from Hossain's factory, 89 have found work in other garment factories. 127 have left Dhaka and returned to their villages. The rest are doing what Begum is doing: day labour, domestic work, anything. The Bangladesh Garment Workers Union estimates that 68,000 workers lost jobs in 2025 due to factory closures. The government disputes this figure but provides no alternative count.

Hossain's factory is not closed. It is running at 40% capacity. He has orders, but not enough to justify keeping all his lines operational. "The buyers say they want to support Bangladesh," he says. "But their procurement departments look at delivery times. We cannot compete anymore."

What Is Not Being Done

Solutions exist. They are technical, boring, and unglamorous. Electronic customs clearance reduces inspection rates and processing time. Private terminal operators bring capital and efficiency. Dedicated freight corridors separate port traffic from urban congestion. These are not revolutionary ideas. They are standard practice in every competitive port system.

Bangladesh's government has studied these solutions. The World Bank produced a 340-page report in 2022. The Asian Development Bank funded a $150 million technical assistance programme in 2023. Recommendations sit in ministry files. Implementation requires coordination between Chittagong Port Authority, the National Board of Revenue, the Ministry of Shipping, and the Ministry of Commerce. Coordination requires political will. Political will requires that someone in power sees the crisis as urgent.

The caretaker government, in power since the disputed January 2024 elections, has focused on constitutional reform and political reconciliation. The economy is not ignored, but it is not prioritised. Port reform does not generate headlines or mobilise constituencies. It is the kind of grinding institutional work that never feels urgent until it is too late.

What Happens Next

Mosharraf Hossain is considering closing his factory. If he does, 1,200 workers will join the 68,000 who lost jobs in 2025. If he keeps it open at 40% capacity, he will lose money for another year, maybe two, until his savings run out. Either way, the factory is not sustainable.

Bangladesh built its economy on garments. The industry employs 4.2 million people directly and supports perhaps 15 million when you count fabric suppliers, transport workers, and the families who depend on wages. It is not a sophisticated economy, but it worked. Women who would have spent their lives in rice paddies earned wages, sent their children to school, bought tin roofs for their houses. The industry was a ladder out of poverty for millions.

That ladder is now uncertain. Not because Bangladesh's workers are less skilled. Not because wages rose too fast. Because the port does not work and no one with power has made fixing it a priority.

Rina Begum does not follow trade policy or port efficiency metrics. She knows that she had a job in January and does not have one in April. She knows that her daughter asks why they eat rice and lentils now instead of rice and vegetables and fish. She knows that the factory is still there, the machines are still there, but the work is not.

The container from Antwerp is still in Chittagong. In another week, the factory will pay the demurrage fees and send it back. There is no point bringing it to Gazipur now. The order was cancelled. The buyer found another factory in Vietnam.