Strategic Masterplan for the Jute Sector Revival: Volume IV – Anatomy of the 2025–2026 Raw Jute Market Instability and a Commodity Futures, Advance Trading and Warehouse Receipt Architecture for Bangladesh

This fourth volume of the Strategic Masterplan for the Jute Sector Revival examines the raw jute crisis that ran from the 2025 harvest to early 2026, when the Bangladesh Jute Mills Association (BJMA) and the Bangladesh Jute Spinners Association (BJSA) warned of a nationwide mill shutdown from 1 February 2026. It traces the crisis to four converging distortions: a sharp rise in raw jute prices after the harvest, a smaller crop alongside much higher Indian prices, a credit asymmetry that left mills unable to buy and hold a year's fibre while well-funded traders could, and a stop-start export policy that fed speculative stockholding. The volume then sets out a market-based response built on the commodity derivatives exchange now being prepared by the Chittagong Stock Exchange (CSE) under the Bangladesh Securities and Exchange Commission (BSEC): raw jute futures priced by cost of carry, pre-sowing forward contracts and put options for producer groups, electronic negotiable warehouse receipts (e-NWRs) as bankable collateral, a jute "crush spread" that lets mills lock in conversion margins, and exchange position limits and inventory reporting in place of ad hoc export bans. It closes with a three-step rollout. The proposals are policy design, not forecasts. Several of the source's figures were corrected or qualified against published data, notably the scale of the harvest-to-January price rise, the crop estimate and the CSE's launch products; these changes are listed in Section 6. Volume IV of the series. Continues Volume III (10.5281/zenodo.23552425); references Volume I (10.5281/zenodo.23546410) and Volume II (10.5281/zenodo.23547191). Six figures; review notes and corrections in Section 6.