Somewhere in south Punjab this evening, a farmer sits on a charpai with a notebook and a calculator, doing the arithmetic that will decide what this country eats next year. He does this every October. This October, the sums do not work.
Take the first bag he must buy before a seed touches the soil. Diammonium phosphate, DAP, the root food that helps wheat establish itself before winter. At the end of September it cost about Rs18,000 a bag, against Rs14,000 a year earlier. Two bags to the acre, his usual practice, mean Rs8,000 more. Not for a better bag. The same bag. The difference buys him no extra yield, no protection from frost, no insurance against a poor harvest. It merely buys admission to another season.
Then the tractor. Diesel cost Rs281 a litre in February, before the conflict between America and Iran sent oil prices soaring. Today it is around Rs400, with Rs100 of every litre taken in taxes and duties. Land preparation, planking and the drill consume fifteen to twenty litres an acre, each litre about Rs120 dearer than last October. Call it another Rs2,000. More if the canal fails and he must run a pump.
Urea has escaped the worst of this year’s increase, but not the inflation of recent years. Seed, machinery and field operations have not become cheaper either. Add the ledger honestly and the extra bill comes to roughly Rs10,000 to Rs12,000 per acre for a farmer following this cultivation plan. Across Pakistan’s 23 million wheat acres, this translates to about Rs230 billion of new risk pushed into the soil before anybody knows what the crop will earn. At thirty maunds an acre, the farmer needs roughly Rs350 more per maund just to preserve last year’s margin. That is the price of standing still.
He is not the exception. He is the rule. Punjab’s latest agricultural census counts five million farms, nearly three quarters of them smaller than five acres. Nearly nine in ten farms are owner-operated. This is not principally a story of corporate balance sheets or absentee landlords. For a five-acre wheat grower, the extra bill is about Rs50,000. It can mean school fees, medicine, an animal sold too soon, another advance from the arhti. The risk does not sit in Lahore or Karachi or Islamabad with a committee. It sits on the charpai. These are not men who can roll a loss into next year’s quarterly accounts. Their savings are often already buried in the last crop, and the next crop must pay for everything that happened in between.
And what has the state given him in return? An empty page.
There is no notified price for his next harvest. The minister has suggested something above Rs4,000 per forty kilograms. Parliament’s own food security committee recommends Rs5,000. The National Wheat Policy, already promised, has been sent to the Prime Minister for approval, while the Federal Committee on Agriculture on October 7 could not even finalise Rabi crop targets until an illustrative price is announced. We have a government unable to agree on what wheat should be worth, asking a farmer to decide now how much money to bury in the ground. Sowing has a calendar. Policy, apparently, does not. He cannot postpone land preparation until the Prime Minister signs a file. The crop will not wait for a cabinet agenda.
And the farmer remembers April. The federal food minister then called Rs3,500 to Rs4,000 per maund a fair return. Official procurement had retreated, its private replacement faltering, and farmers needing cash sold into a crowded market. By October wheat was above Rs5,000 in urban markets, while the average twenty-kilogram flour bag cost about Rs2,850, one-third more than a year ago. The farmer was not invited to that appreciation. Those with cash and godowns were better placed to wait. We have designed a market in which the man who grows the grain must sell when he needs money, and the man who can hold it is free to choose when he needs a price.
Now look at the price the state is prepared to pay, just not to him. Pakistan has contracted 365,000 tonnes of imported wheat at nearly $349 a tonne, and tendered for another 185,000. The first cargoes are due by November 20. Read that date again. Foreign wheat is scheduled to arrive in the very weeks the Pakistani farmer is deciding whether to sow his own. Officials say his indicative price may be tied to international import parity. The trader knows his price before the ship sails. The farmer is expected to buy his fertiliser on the strength of a number nobody will put in writing. In Islamabad,Lahore and Karachi this is called market reform. In the village it is called gambling with someone else’s livelihood.
Then the water. The irrigation authority has projected a 22 percent canal-water shortage for Punjab and Sindh this Rabi against their seasonal entitlements. This does not mean a 22 percent smaller wheat harvest. It means a late rotation, a tubewell started in desperation, another diesel bill. And if he cannot afford that bill, it means a crop left thirsty. In the notebook, a water shortage becomes more diesel or less wheat.
So what does a rational man do when the input price climbs and the selling price is a rumour? He cuts. He halves the phosphate and leans on urea because urea is cheaper per bag, though one nutrient cannot replace another. The fertiliser industry’s September numbers already show DAP sales down roughly a third from a year earlier. This is not proof of what every wheat farmer will apply. It is a warning from the cash counter. His acreage may still appear in the government’s returns. His yield will tell another story. The shortage of 2027 may be planted this October.
The ledger can be balanced, but only if the state stops hiding its own math. Three decisions are required, none beyond the state’s reach. Announce a real wheat marketing policy before sowing, not a price rumour. If Rs5,000 is to be a support price, name the buyer and the money behind it; if it is merely indicative, say so plainly. Follow the DAP bag from port to dealer and publish who earns what along the way. Put affordable cultivation credit in farmers’ hands now, not after they have cut their fertiliser. Punjab has a Kissan Card, but a card that cannot meet the increased bill, or cannot reach the tenant growing the crop, is not an answer. And stop treating imports as an emergency lever pulled without regard to the sowing calendar. A government able to contract foreign wheat in dollars ought to be able to explain its plans to the man growing wheat in rupees.
He will sow anyway. That is the tragedy the planners never price in. Hope is his oldest input, the only one still untaxed. He will sow, and cut, and hope, and next April the country will open his notebook and read it in the price of a roti.