We Grew the Wheat. We Chose to Import It.
In early April the grain stood stacked by the roadside in Sahiwal, DG Khan and Bahawalnagar, harvested and bagged, waiting for a buyer the system had promised but never delivered. Three months later the buyer arrived. Not the state purchasing from Pakistani farmers, but the state purchasing from foreign suppliers, paying in scarce dollars.
Pakistan’s 2025-26 wheat production is estimated at 29.31 million tonnes against consumption of roughly 31.9 million. The gap is real. This import, however, is not the product of a harvest failure. It is the product of a procurement failure. The wheat existed. What did not exist was the institutional will to buy it at a price that reflected its value while it was still in the farmer’s hands.
Private intermediaries bought at Rs 2,900-3,200 per 40 kilograms from farmers who had loans falling due and no storage. Those intermediaries held the grain and watched the open-market price climb to Rs 4,600 by July. The middleman’s profit was the farmer’s loss. The state, having refused to spend rupees in April, must now spend dollars in August. The invoice, compiled from months of evasion, comes due all at once.
The cycle was predictable. After the 2022 floods the administrative reflex became “import.” In 2023-24 the country allowed large duty-free private imports into a market already carrying record stocks. That was 3.44 million tonnes at a cost of $1.005 billion. In 2024 and 2025 the Minimum Support Price was first ignored and then abolished under IMF conditionality linked to a $7.1 billion Extended Fund Facility. This happened years ahead of the phased timeline the Fund had allowed until FY2026. In October 2025 the government reversed course and restored the price, but the supporting machinery never materialised. In January 2026 the aggregator model collapsed. Punjab set a procurement target of three million tonnes, but by late May, with partial procurement continuing into June, total procurement fell far short of the target. Three seasons, three frameworks, one recurring failure: the system arrives after the price has already been set.
The old procurement system was deeply flawed. It captured only about a quarter of production and skewed toward large landholders and politically influential actors. According to a Competition Commission of Pakistan analysis, the top 40 per cent of farmers in Punjab sold 84 per cent of their wheat to official buyers, while the bottom 40 per cent sold only 6.4 per cent, forced to accept below-benchmark prices from private traders. Abolishing it overnight without private storage, warehouse-receipt financing or functioning commodity exchanges did not liberate the small farmer. It exposed him to cartels he could not match. The state was weak when farmers needed a floor. It is assertive now that consumers need a ceiling. That is not food security. It is political timing.
The cost will be paid in November. Punjab’s wheat acreage has already fallen sharply. It fell by roughly 5.5 per cent between 2023-24 and 2024-25, a reduction of close to a million acres, according to official crop reporting data corroborated by independent assessments. The decline has continued into 2025-26. Farmers are not abandoning wheat out of ideology. They are doing arithmetic after three years of suppressed returns, delayed buyers and policy uncertainty. Many are moving into canola and mustard. These are thinner markets with less infrastructure, no public benchmarks and highly concentrated private buyers. Unlike wheat, which benefits from a massive state-backed consumption floor and established procurement infrastructure, edible oils face different demand elasticities and lack the same strategic reserve backing. If oilseed acreage expands faster than processing capacity, the same distress-sale pattern will simply be exported to a new crop.
Climate stress amplifies the risk. The 2025 floods were the worst in Punjab in four decades, and the 2026 harvest lost further volume to heat and storms. Rising temperatures and erratic rainfall are no longer background noise; they are actively cutting yields. Yet the deeper threat remains institutional. A farmer who repeatedly experiences losses without protection responds rationally. He reduces acreage. He shifts crops. He exits. And once he exits, he does not return.
Sovereignty does not lie only in borders or foreign reserves. It also lies in the ability to buy, store and release grain when the market fails. By that measure the import announcement is not a solution. It is the price of a failure we chose.
The 2027 harvest window opens in November. Not in April when the crop arrives. Not in July when the state panics, but in November when the farmer stands in his field and decides what to plant. On that morning he will not be thinking about policy frameworks or export targets or buffer stocks. He will be thinking about what the last three seasons cost him and whether the state that failed him in April, imported in July and abandoned him after harvest has given him any reason to trust it again.
That is the only question that matters now. That is the question that must be answered before he plants.
