Bangladesh trails behind its economic neighbors in the export of footwear and leather goods, which highlights the nation's lack of attention to a sector that has a crucial advantage over its rivals: frequent access to the primary rawhide. As an illustration, Vietnam earns almost $20 billion compared to Bangladesh's $1 billion in export revenue, despite Vietnam having begun exporting footwear and leather goods earlier. Every year, following Eid-ul-Adha, Bangladesh's sectoral vulnerability is made clear. Rawhide is a rare commodity, and its price keeps going down every year. The cost nowadays is even less than it was ten or more years ago. Due to the detrimental effects it has on the disadvantaged people who are supposed to receive the sales proceeds from more than a million sacrificed animals, this problem is particularly acute during Eid-ul-Adha. The price difference between sacrifice animals and their raw hides has increased while decreasing over the past five to six years, further highlighting the discrepancy. The price difference between sacrifice animals and their raw hides has increased while decreasing over the past five to six years, further highlighting the discrepancy. Tanners blame the global consumer movement away from leather-made footwear to synthetic alternatives in the late 2000s as a result of the global financial crisis for their struggles. The true setback, though, was when tanning salons were forced to follow environmental regulations. hey were forced to relocate in 2017 from the capital's tanning hub, Hazaribagh, to a new tannery complex in Savar. Additionally, they were required to seek certification of environmental compliance from the Leather Working Group (LWG), an international confederation of leading brands. This made the industry's challenges much more complex. Without the LWG certification, we don't receive a fair price for our leather, and paradoxically, the new complex to which we were compelled to relocate has a subpar central effluent treatment plant (CETP), according to Md. Mizanur Rahman, vice chairman of the Bangladesh Tanners Association (BTA). He added that there had been little progress to date. A Chinese business had constructed the flawed CETP, and in 2020, they turned it over to a local, specialized company that was mostly under government control. "It is the CETP that kept each of the over 140 tanneries at Savar environmentally non-compliant before the eyes of the best international buyers, who would have paid us more than double prices," he claimed. According to his association, finished leathers were exported at $2.25 per square foot before the move to Savar, when LWG compliance wasn't a huge concern for many overseas purchasers, and it's now $0.8 to $1.2 per square foot. In order to purchase completed or semi-finished leather from Bangladesh, a few Chinese and Italian buyers stayed behind. It is a sad reality for us because we have to keep haggling with them for a few cents per square foot," the tanner added. According to BTA Chairman Md. Shaheen Ahamed, India transformed its tanneries after the LWG initiative began in 2005, and as of now, nearly 250 of them are LWG-compliant, including 42 in West Bengal alone. Only two tanneries in Bangladesh have received certification, but a third is in the works, he added. Furthermore, none of the fortunate three tanneries were located in the Savar tannery complex. According to Mizanur Rahman, after speaking with the top tannery CETP technology business from Italy, tanners proposed the government spend around Tk 50 crore to get the CETP up and running, and then another Tk 200–250 crore to bring it up to par. According to Rahman, the Tk300 crore investment and the private sector's adequate participation in the management of the CETP would aid numerous tanners in becoming LWG compliant, and they would make between $400 and $500 million annually from the export of compliant leather. Rahman stated, "Like our rival tanners, we could have sold our completed leather at $2.25 per square foot. Exports of leather and leather products brought in around $1.25 billion for the country in the fiscal year 2021–2022, but less than $125 million of that came from finished or semi-finished leather, down from $400 million in the previous year. According to BTA, exporters of footwear and other leather products must import compliant leather from other nations in order to meet the customers' requirements, which costs the nation more than $150 million a year. After finishing, China once again sells some of the semi-finished leather it purchases from Bangladesh for a higher price while also expanding its domestic market for leather goods to consume a significant amount of it. According to the BTA Vice Chairman, the domestic leather market in Bangladesh has been trapped in a vicious cycle of low productivity, high cost, and slow growth that has prevented it from expanding sufficiently to absorb a sizable portion of the 27–30 crore square feet of leather produced annually by approximately 1 crore cows and buffaloes and 2 crore goats and sheep. The chairman of the association added, "We have visited so many compliant facilities across the world, and the LWG certification would not be a tough job for most of us. A functioning CETP for the country's more than 95% tanneries would be a simple game changer. Kaberi Maitraya, Senior Reporter, Ekattor Television