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1 week ago | 
dawn.com | Chaudhary Mohammad Ashraff |Khalid Wattoo
This wheat season has turned out even more punishing for farmers than the last. Buyers are scarce, and market prices have plunged to around Rs2,200-2,300 per maund — far below production costs and nearly half the support price announced for the two crops of 2023 and 2024. Even more concerning, Punjab’s harvest — accounting for nearly 75 per cent of national production — has yet to peak.
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2 weeks ago | 
dawn.com | Chaudhary Mohammad Ashraff |Khalid Wattoo
Pakistan, home to over 250 million people, is edging close to a deeper water crisis. Climate change is tightening its grip, with rising temperatures, shrinking glaciers, and increasingly erratic rainfall. As a result, the water supply has become less reliable than ever. Hotter days mean higher evaporation, driving up demand for both drinking water and crop irrigation — which consumes over 90 per cent of the country’s available water.
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1 month ago | 
dawn.com | Khalid Wattoo |Waqar Ahmad
Just recently, the prime minister constituted a 15-member committee tasked with formulating policy and administrative measures to revive cotton production in the country. Once a net exporter, Pakistan touched a production peak of 13.96 million bales in 2014-15. Since then, however, output has experienced a dramatic downturn, plummeting to just 5.5m bales in 2024-25 — 50 per cent below target and 34pc lower than last year’s yields.
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2 months ago | 
dawn.com | Waqar Ahmad |Khalid Wattoo |Zohaib Majeed
In recent years, Pakistan has been grappling with twin challenges: ensuring an adequate food supply to meet the dietary needs of a rapidly growing population (food security) and safeguarding public health by mitigating hazards during food production, processing, and storage (food safety). Pakistan is severely impacted by its ineffective food control system. One in five people has a foodborne illness — twice the global average.
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2 months ago | 
dawn.com | Khalid Wattoo |Waqar Ahmad
In the wheat sector, the government has decided to take two major policy shifts: abolishing the decades-long practice of setting a support price and discontinuing direct procurement from farmers. These policy measures mark a shift towards deregulating the wheat market, a longstanding demand of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and other international lenders.
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2 months ago | 
dawn.com | Khalid Wattoo |Waqar Ahmad
Pakistan’s economic and business landscape presents formidable challenges. The manufacturing sector, including large-scale industries and small and medium enterprises (SMEs), is struggling under the burden of high energy costs and excessive taxation. Meanwhile, the service sector is constrained by low per capita income and inadequate household disposable income.
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2 months ago | 
dawn.com | Waqar Ahmad |Khalid Wattoo |Abbas Nasir
The circular bioeconomy, with its rapidly growing global significance, offers immense opportunities for agricultural countries like Pakistan. It revolves around transforming agricultural waste, by-products, and co-products into food, bioenergy, and other materials through recycling, reusing, and repurposing. It reduces the reliance on virgin resources, particularly fossil fuels and petrochemical materials, and also decreases waste disposal into the environment.
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Jan 19, 2025 | 
dawn.com | Waqar Ahmad |Khalid Wattoo |Muhammad Amir Rana
In Pakistan, the biggest flaw in the agricultural marketing system is the limited number of marketing channels available for farmers to sell their produce. This constraint adversely affects the farmers’ market power (pricing power/bargaining power) and, in turn, their profitability, often making farming itself unsustainable. As a result, farmers often seek subsidies and support prices for survival.
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Jan 12, 2025 | 
dawn.com | Khalid Wattoo |Waqar Ahmad |Muhammad Amir Rana
The federal government recently unveiled the country’s economic performance for the first quarter (July–September) of fiscal year 2024-25. Sadly, the agriculture sector failed to sustain last year’s momentum, registering a mere 1.15 per cent growth, far lower than the 8.09pc achieved during the same period last year. The disappointing performance is primarily due to a sharp contraction in the crop subsector, which exhibited a negative growth rate of 5.93pc compared to a positive 16.11pc in Q1FY24.
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Dec 8, 2024 | 
dawn.com | Khalid Wattoo |Waqar Ahmad
Last month, the Punjab Assembly took the lead in amending its agricultural income tax (AIT) law, increasing the maximum tax rate from 15 per cent (in Punjab and Sindh) to align with federal income tax rates for individuals and businesses, which reach up to 45pc. Other provinces are still deliberating similar changes, all in response to strings attached to the ongoing International Monetary Fund (IMF) programme.
