Navy seizes and destroys illegal hilsa nets worth Tk 25.79 crore in Barishal

Every food business in 16 standard categories will have to register with the Bangladesh Food Safety Authority from 1 November, and operators dealing in specialised or higher-risk food products will also need licences, the authority said in a notice issued on Wednesday.

The requirement follows the Safe Food (Registration and Licensing) Regulations 2026, which were published in the official gazette on 16 July. The authority has now set 1 November as the date from which businesses must hold the papers, and it has asked owners to apply before then.

The registration list is broad. It covers restaurants, bakeries, juice bars, pastry shops and catering services, as well as makers of packaged food, sweet shops, dairy producers and importers of processed food. Roadside vendors selling pitha, puri and peyaju are included too. So are wholesale grocery businesses, importers of raw and fresh food, warehouses and cold storage facilities, and producers of edible oil and salt.

The licensing track is narrower and aimed at products that carry more risk or make specific health claims. It covers four kinds of approval: a business licence, a premises licence, a licence for manufactured or imported products, and registration of licensed products. Businesses handling infant formula, foods for older people or people with medical conditions, health supplements, dietetic and medical foods, probiotics and prebiotics, and nutraceuticals fall under it. So do operators dealing in genetically modified, organic, irradiated, novel, functional and fortified foods, and goods that claim health or disease-risk benefits under the 2025 advertising and claims rules.

The authority said first-time registration will be free for the 16 conventional categories. For specialised manufacturers, the premises licence fee depends on floor space: Tk 10,000 for premises of up to 100 square metres, rising to Tk 60,000 for a new licence for premises larger than 10,000 square metres. Registration and licences will be valid for three years and must be renewed after that.

Applications can be made at the authority or at its district offices for now. The BFSA says it is gradually moving towards a fully online system. Once registered, every food package must carry the BFSA registration number, so a buyer can check whether a producer is registered and can quote the number when making a complaint.

The notice is the latest step in a longer effort to tighten oversight of a sector where much of the supply chain, from street stalls to large processors, has operated with little formal documentation. The 2013 Safe Food Act already made it an offence to run a food business without required registration or a licence, and the authority has used mobile courts and fines against outlets in the past. The new regulations set out which businesses need which paper, what they must pay and how long the approval lasts.

What is not yet clear is how the system will work in practice for the smallest operators. The notice did not say how many businesses are expected to register, how district offices will handle the volume, what the penalty will be for a first breach, or whether enforcement will begin immediately on 1 November or allow a grace period. It also did not explain how a vendor with a single stall will manage the paperwork or whether the requirement to print a registration number on packaging will add costs for small producers.

The authority's stated aim is transparency and accountability, and it argues that registration will make production and marketing more orderly and help protect public health. Whether that happens will depend on whether the registration drive reaches the roadside stalls and neighbourhood kitchens that feed most of the country, and whether inspections follow the paperwork.

From 1 November, customers can start looking for the BFSA number on packaged food, and businesses that have not applied will be trading outside the rules. The next signals to watch are the authority's guidance for small vendors, the first enforcement actions after the deadline, and whether the promised online application system arrives on schedule.

The world will overshoot the 1.5C warming limit set in Paris, and the task now is to make that overshoot as small and as short as possible, according to the United Nations Environment Programme's annual assessment of the gap between climate promises and the cuts needed.

The Emissions Gap Report 2026, subtitled The Point of Return, was published on Wednesday, less than three weeks before governments meet at the COP31 climate summit in Antalya, Turkey. It is the seventeenth edition of a report that compares what countries have pledged with what science says is required.

The report's most optimistic pathway assumes immediate and sustained cuts. Under it, global warming peaks at 1.7 to 1.8C above pre-industrial levels around the middle of the century and then falls back to 1.5C or below by 2100, with about a 50 per cent chance of success. Emissions would have to fall by 18 per cent by 2030, 45 per cent by 2035 and 69 per cent by 2040, all compared with 2025 levels. That is an average reduction of nearly 6 per cent a year.

Countries' current national climate plans fall far short of that. If every plan is delivered in full, emissions would fall by only 5 to 8 per cent by 2030 and 11 to 15 per cent by 2035, leaving the world on course for about 2.6C of warming this century. If governments stick with the policies now in force, the report projects 2.8C, and even meeting all climate plans plus long-term net-zero targets would limit warming only to about 2.1C.

This year's projections are worse than last year's, UNEP said, because of the United States' withdrawal from the Paris Agreement and revised estimates of historical emissions. The United States is the world's second-largest emitter after China, and its retreat has removed its previous climate target from the UN's global accounting.

Global greenhouse gas emissions in 2025 were broadly flat compared with 2024, the report found, but the difference is too small to call a peak. Carbon dioxide from burning coal, oil and gas continued to rise. Even the most optimistic pathway now depends on removing and permanently storing roughly 320 gigatonnes of carbon dioxide over the rest of the century, about eight years of current global emissions, and UNEP says the feasibility of doing that at scale is uncertain.

There is progress to build on. Since the Paris Agreement was adopted in 2015, renewable electricity has grown far faster than expected, the expansion of coal and oil supply has been slower than projected, and climate policies have cut emissions in many countries. The report argues that scaling up policies already shown to work could still put the world on the lower-overshoot path.

"Every additional fraction of a degree and additional year of warming above 1.5C increases climate impacts and risks," UNEP executive director Inger Andersen said. "This includes the deadly floods, heatwaves and wildfires that have plagued many nations this year. So, we must pull out all the stops to minimize peak warming and return to 1.5C by the end of the century. This is possible."

Simon Stiell, executive secretary of UN Climate Change, said the tools to change course exist. Renewables are now the cheapest source of new electricity in most of the world, he said, and solar deployment has grown about seven times faster than expected a decade ago. "The emissions gap is now a leadership gap," he said, calling on the G20 to lead and on governments to speed up clean energy, electrification and cuts to methane.

The report lands with particular weight in Bangladesh. The low-lying delta is routinely listed among the countries most exposed to floods, cyclones, storm surges and salinity intrusion, and it has argued at UN talks that vulnerable nations need grant-based finance for loss and damage rather than loans. Saimum Parvez, special assistant to the prime minister for environment, forest and climate change, said this month that Bangladesh produces just 0.5 per cent of global carbon emissions but loses 2 to 3 per cent of its gross domestic product every year to climate-related disasters.

That mismatch between responsibility and impact is central to the negotiations ahead. The report's benchmarks would require rich and large-emitting countries to cut far faster than their current plans envisage, while financing adaptation and carbon removal in poorer countries. The second Global Stocktake, the formal check on collective progress under the Paris Agreement, begins at COP31 and is due to conclude in 2028.

Several things remain uncertain. Governments have not yet said whether they will strengthen their 2035 pledges before or at Antalya, and the report notes that new pledges submitted since last year have made little difference to the projections. Whether carbon removal can be scaled safely and affordably, and who pays for it, is unresolved. So is the question of how countries will handle the years spent above 1.5C, when the report says floods, heatwaves and wildfires will become more intense.

What happens next will be measured at COP31 and in the national plans that follow. UNEP's message is that the 1.5C goal has not been abandoned, only deferred: warming will pass the threshold, but the size of the peak and the speed of the return are still, in its words, a question of political action rather than scientific possibility.