Pakistan is a country of farms, crops, livestock and millions of farmers, yet its food import bill is moving in the opposite direction from its agricultural ambitions. In FY2025-26, Pakistan imported $9.15 billion worth of food, while food exports fell to approximately $5.02 billion. The result was a food trade deficit of around $4.13 billion. Food imports increased by 11.7 percent, while exports declined by almost 29.5 percent.
The problem is not a lack of agricultural resources. Agriculture accounts for roughly one-quarter of GDP, while livestock alone contributes 14.6 percent of GDP and 62.4 percent of agricultural value addition. More than eight million rural families depend on livestock for their livelihoods. Yet Pakistan’s share of global meat exports remains below one percent. We produce, but we do not produce enough value.
Consider edible oil. Pakistan’s own Economic Survey estimates that domestic production meets only about 10 percent of the country’s edible-oil requirements. The import bill for edible oil is projected at around $6 billion for FY2025-26. In a country where millions of acres are cultivated every year, depending overwhelmingly on imported edible oil is not simply a trade problem. It is a failure of agricultural planning.
Palm oil alone accounted for about 41 percent of food-group imports. The government has acknowledged the need to increase domestic oilseed production and has proposed raising self-sufficiency from roughly 10 percent towards 27 percent in the short term, 40 percent in the medium term and 70 percent in the long term. The lesson is obvious. Food security cannot be built by importing our way out of agricultural weakness. Nor can export growth be built simply by exporting more raw commodities.
Rice illustrates the problem. One of Pakistan’s most important agricultural exports, rice saw export earnings reportedly fall from about $3.35 billion to $2.29 billion, a decline of roughly 31 percent. Competition, particularly in non-basmati rice, has intensified. The answer is not to blame international competition. The answer is to become better competitors.
That means better seeds, higher yields, efficient irrigation, mechanisation, agricultural research, cold chains, storage, processing, certification, traceability and branding. It means moving from selling commodities to selling products. The government appears to understand this. At an agriculture roundtable in Islamabad this week, Planning Minister Ahsan Iqbal stressed that Pakistan must move from raw commodity exports towards value-added, certified and branded products. Nearly 100 government officials, exporters, growers, academics and business representatives participated. That is the right direction.
But Pakistan has heard the language of agricultural transformation before. The real question is whether policy can finally move beyond conferences and declarations. The potential is enormous. Pakistan produced 29.61 million tonnes of wheat, 89.45 million tonnes of sugarcane, 9.99 million tonnes of rice and 8.79 million tonnes of maize in FY2025-26. Agriculture grew by 2.89 percent, while livestock grew by 3.75 percent. Yet production figures alone can create a dangerous illusion of success.
A country can produce millions of tonnes and still have an inefficient food system. The real questions are different. How much food is wasted? How much water is consumed per unit of production? How much does the farmer earn? How much does the consumer pay? How much foreign exchange is earned from each hectare? And how much value is added before a product leaves the country? These are the questions Pakistan needs to ask with far greater urgency.
The water question is particularly serious. Agriculture consumes the overwhelming share of Pakistan’s available freshwater, while climate change is making rainfall increasingly unpredictable and extreme weather more damaging. Agricultural growth cannot continue to depend simply on using more land, more water and more inputs. The future must be productivity-driven, not resource-driven.
There is also an important opportunity in Saudi Arabia. Pakistan and Saudi Arabia have recently agreed to pursue agricultural and food exports worth $3 billion, including meat and other food products, while exploring water-efficient agricultural technologies. But opportunities become exports only when countries can meet international standards of quality, certification, traceability and reliable supply.
The farmer cannot do this alone. Nor can government. Pakistan needs an agricultural ecosystem in which research institutions develop commercially useful technologies, banks provide affordable credit, industry invests in processing, exporters develop markets and government provides predictable policies rather than repeatedly changing them. Pakistan’s agricultural challenge is therefore much larger than agriculture. It is about the country’s entire economic philosophy.
For decades, we have celebrated how much we produce. We should now ask how much we earn from what we produce. We have farmers but insufficient productivity. We have livestock but a tiny share of the global meat market. We grow fruits but lack adequate processing and cold-chain capacity. We cultivate oilseeds but import billions of dollars of edible oil. We export rice but remain vulnerable to international prices and competition. This is not just an agricultural problem. It is Pakistan’s failure to create value.
We should not be exporting our crops and importing their value. What we need is not another slogan, but a clear national mission to produce more, waste less, process better and compete globally. Pakistan’s farms already create enormous wealth. The real failure is that too little of it reaches the farmer, the consumer and the national economy. We do not need to grow more of what we already have. We need to earn more from it.