A Market Too Large to Ignore
In March 2021, imams at three of France's most prominent mosques — Paris, Lyon, and Évry — issued a joint statement warning that a French Agriculture Ministry circular could effectively ban the halal slaughter of poultry from July of that year. The announcement sent shockwaves through France's estimated 5-6 million Muslim community, arriving weeks before Ramadan and reigniting long-simmering debates about religious freedom, secularism, and the place of Islam in French public life. The French Ministry of Agriculture subsequently clarified that the circular had not introduced a ban on ritual slaughter — it had updated control procedures at abattoirs without overriding religious exemptions. But the episode, widely reported as a ban in international Muslim media, illuminated something significant: when it comes to halal food — what it means, who certifies it, and who has the right to regulate it — the stakes are simultaneously religious, political, and deeply economic.
Those economic stakes have never been larger. The global halal food market was valued at approximately $2.71 trillion in 2024, with projections suggesting it could exceed $5.9 trillion by 2033, growing at a compound annual rate of nearly nine percent. Asia-Pacific currently leads the market, accounting for more than 48 percent of total value. Beyond the nearly 2 billion Muslims worldwide who observe halal dietary requirements, non-Muslim consumers increasingly choose halal products for their perceived associations with hygiene, ethical sourcing, and quality control. The market is no longer a niche religious segment — it is a major global food economy, and the regulations that govern access to it are shaping trade relationships, export strategies, and domestic food policy in countries around the world.
For Bangladesh — a 92 percent Muslim-majority nation with a domestic halal market worth an estimated $107 billion and a growing food processing sector — the question is not whether halal standards matter. It is why a country so culturally aligned with halal production has captured less than $1 billion of a global market measured in trillions.
The Politics of Halal: What France's Controversy Revealed
The 2021 France episode is instructive precisely because of what it exposed about the complexity of halal regulation in non-Muslim-majority societies. Halal slaughter — which requires an animal to be killed by a swift cut to the throat without prior stunning, following a blessing invoking God — conflicts directly with European Union and French animal welfare directives that require stunning before slaughter. The EU grants religious exemptions to this rule, allowing halal and kosher slaughter to continue, but the terms of those exemptions are subject to ongoing legal and political contest. Belgium's Flanders and Wallonia regions effectively ended un-stunned halal slaughter through regional decrees upheld by the European Court of Justice — a decision that has since required Muslims in Flanders to source halal meat from other regions. The French situation in 2021 was technically different: the circular was a procedural update, not a ban. But the mosque leaders' alarm was not irrational. It reflected an accurate reading of a political environment in which halal practices have become a recurring flashpoint for France's secular (laïcité) identity debates, with figures from Marine Le Pen to mainstream conservatives repeatedly raising halal as a symbol of insufficient integration.
Animal welfare and religious freedom are genuine values in tension, and the debate deserves to be engaged with honestly. European animal rights organisations that oppose un-stunned slaughter raise legitimate scientific questions about whether it causes additional suffering. Muslim and Jewish religious authorities, and some scientists, counter that a properly performed cut is swift and that pre-stunning involves its own animal welfare concerns. What makes the halal controversy politically potent in France, Belgium, and elsewhere is that it sits at the intersection of this legitimate welfare debate and a broader cultural-political project that has, on various occasions, targeted halal food less because of animal welfare and more as a proxy for restricting visible Muslim religious practice. When a local French official in 2021 forced a halal supermarket to stock pork and alcohol, animal welfare was not the rationale — cultural conformity was. That conflation has made halal food a flashpoint for Muslim communities in Europe in a way that goes well beyond dietary rules.
For the global halal market, however, Europe's internal debates are a sideshow relative to the enormous growth happening across the Muslim-majority world and in the regulatory architectures that govern access to it. Malaysia's JAKIM (Department of Islamic Development), Indonesia's MUI (Majelis Ulama Indonesia), Saudi Arabia's SASO, the UAE's ESMA — these are the certification authorities that functionally control access to the world's largest halal import markets. Their standards, accreditation requirements, and mutual recognition frameworks are the regulatory terrain on which the global halal trade is actually won and lost.
Why Bangladesh Earns Less Than $1 Billion in a $2.71 Trillion Market
Bangladesh's halal export performance is a story of structural governance failure more than of product quality or market access. In the 2024-25 fiscal year, Bangladesh's halal-labelled exports reached $988.6 million — just under $1 billion — mostly agro-based products, according to the Export Promotion Bureau. The country's Islamic Foundation Bangladesh (IFB), operating under the Ministry of Religious Affairs, has been issuing halal certificates since 2007. By the time the certification controversy intensified in 2024-25, the Foundation had issued certificates to approximately 235 companies with around 2,000 halal brand products, of which 66 companies were actively exporting more than 600 product categories to the Middle East, Europe, and North America.
The problem began in September 2024, when the Bangladesh Standards and Testing Institution (BSTI) — through a gazette notification from the Industries Ministry — declared that it would begin issuing halal certifications alongside IFB. The move created what exporters, industry associations, and independent experts immediately characterised as a damaging dual certification system. Where previously businesses could obtain a single halal certificate from IFB, they now faced the prospect of navigating two separate regulatory bodies — each with its own fees, audit processes, and documentation requirements — for the same certification. PRAN Group, the country's largest food conglomerate, obtained halal certification from IFB in 2015 and from BSTI in 2023. PRAN Managing Director Eleash Mridha was direct about the consequence: the dual system inflates compliance costs and weakens international credibility because importing countries' halal authorities do not recognise parallel domestic systems easily.
The deeper problem is one of international recognition. Bangladesh's Islamic Foundation follows OIC (Organisation of Islamic Cooperation) standards, and BSTI gained SMIIC (Standards and Metrology Institute for Islamic Countries) membership in 2022 — but neither body has secured mutual recognition agreements with the authorities that functionally gatekeep the world's largest halal markets. There are no mutual agreements between Bangladesh's certification bodies and JAKIM (Malaysia), MUI (Indonesia), or China's Halal Authority — meaning that Bangladeshi exporters must conduct separate, costly, time-consuming audits for each major market they wish to enter. India, by contrast, has secured JAKIM affiliation for its halal certification under the I-CAS Halal scheme, allowing Indian halal meat exporters to access Malaysian and other markets more efficiently. Brazil and Australia — neither of which are Muslim-majority countries — dominate global halal meat exports partly because their certification frameworks are internationally recognised and their supply chains are integrated into the global halal trade infrastructure.
On July 14, 2025, Industries Adviser Adilur Rahman Khan inaugurated a National Halal Laboratory (NHL) at BSTI — a genuine step forward in testing infrastructure. But the governance dispute remained unresolved. Religious Affairs Adviser Dr AFM Khalid Hossain acknowledged publicly that the government would convene a meeting of advisers and secretaries to resolve the certification deadlock, recognising that the dual system was actively impeding the export growth both bodies nominally exist to serve.
Bangladesh's Constitutional and Cultural Context for Halal
Understanding Bangladesh's halal governance requires understanding its constitutional and cultural architecture. Bangladesh's 1972 constitution was originally founded on four principles — nationalism, socialism, democracy, and secularism — and Islam was not the state religion. The Eighth Amendment of 1988 inserted Islam as the state religion while the constitutional preamble retained the principle that all religions shall have equal rights. This produced an arrangement of deliberate ambiguity: Bangladesh is simultaneously an Islamic state by constitutional designation and a secular republic by constitutional commitment. Courts have upheld this dual arrangement as non-contradictory, treating state recognition of Islam as cultural and symbolic rather than legally theocratic.
In this context, halal is not merely a commercial certification question — it is an expression of the state's relationship with the religious identity of its majority population. The Islamic Foundation Bangladesh operates under the Ministry of Religious Affairs precisely because halal certification is understood as a religious function, not purely a technical food safety matter. This distinguishes Bangladesh's approach from countries like Malaysia, where JAKIM operates with substantial institutional independence and technical infrastructure, or Indonesia, where MUI has built a sophisticated certification ecosystem with mandatory halal labelling being expanded to pharmaceuticals by 2039. Bangladesh's institutional framework for halal reflects the country's own negotiated relationship between religious and secular governance — legitimate in its origins but producing, in practice, an underfunded and bureaucratically contested certification system that serves neither religious integrity nor commercial efficiency well.
Bangladesh's 92 percent Muslim majority means that halal is effectively the default food standard domestically — the question of certification arises primarily in the context of export. But experts have noted the gap between this cultural baseline and formal certification infrastructure. As Dr Md Islam of IUBAT observed, in many countries even drinking water bottles carry halal labels, signalling supply chain transparency to consumers. In Bangladesh, consumer-facing halal labelling on domestic products remains inconsistent, reflecting limited awareness among producers and consumers alike. Building the domestic halal certification culture — not just for export but as a signal of food safety and traceability standards — would be a foundation on which export credibility could be built more effectively.
What Bangladesh Could Capture — and What It Requires
The arithmetic of the opportunity is straightforward. Abu Saleh Patwary, deputy director for halal certification at IFB, has put it plainly: if Bangladesh can capture two to three percent of global halal markets, it would substantially transform the country's foreign exchange position. The global halal food market at $2.71 trillion makes two percent worth more than $54 billion — against the current $988 million in exports. The country's agriculture, fisheries, and food processing sectors — the same sectors that built the remarkable export story of ready-made garments — have the raw material for a major halal export industry. Bangladesh's geographic position gives it proximity to the Gulf, one of the world's largest halal import markets. Its cultural authenticity as a Muslim-majority country could be a brand asset in the same way that Brazil and Australia leverage quality assurance systems and supply chain reliability.
Realising that potential requires resolving the institutional dispute urgently and in a way that builds credibility rather than compounds confusion. The government's announcement of an inter-ministerial meeting to resolve the IFB-BSTI deadlock is necessary but not sufficient. What is needed is a single, internationally accredited halal certification authority with the technical infrastructure — laboratories, auditing capacity, trained personnel — to meet the standards of JAKIM, MUI, SASO, and the Gulf Cooperation Council bodies simultaneously. Pursuing mutual recognition agreements with these authorities requires diplomatic investment alongside technical compliance — India's model of actively lobbying for JAKIM affiliation provides a template. Establishing global-standard abattoirs and halal processing facilities — flagged repeatedly as a critical gap by IFB officials — requires targeted capital investment, potentially through the special economic zones framework or with Gulf state partnership.
The 2025 Telecommunications Reform Policy analogy is instructive: Bangladesh's halal governance problem is structurally similar to its telecoms problem — too many overlapping licences, fragmented authority, lack of clear accountability, and a regulatory framework that accumulated layers over time without strategic coherence. The solution in both cases is rationalisation around clear institutional mandates, international standards, and investment in the technical capacity to enforce them credibly.
France's 2021 halal controversy, whatever its specific resolution, was ultimately a reminder that halal food is contested territory where religion, politics, trade, and cultural identity intersect. Bangladesh is navigating that intersection from a position of enormous latent advantage — cultural authenticity, demographic alignment, agricultural capacity — but with governance infrastructure that has not yet matched the scale of the opportunity. Resolving that gap is not a matter of religious policy alone. It is one of Bangladesh's most significant economic development opportunities in the post-LDC graduation era.
win-tk.org is a wintk publication covering global and regional affairs with a focus on Bangladesh and South Asia.
