From LNG to the land: A roadmap for Murree’s hig...

Summary

• I write this as an appeal to the people of Murree District, from the cool ridges to the valleys of Kahuta and Kotli Sattian.
• And in most of Murree today, not one kilogram of rice is grown.
• Murree District is not one climate but two: cool upper ridges, and the gentler lower belts of Kahuta and Kotli Sattian.

AI Generated Summary

Walk the old tracks above Tret, Dewal or Phagwari and look at the hillsides. You will see stone walls, stacked by hand, stepping down the slopes in long, patient curves. These are the terraces of Murree, and they are the most honest monument this land has. They were not built for tourists. They were built to feed families. Today many of them are collapsing, overgrown, or sold to someone who lives hundreds of kilometres away.

I write this as an appeal to the people of Murree District, from the cool ridges to the valleys of Kahuta and Kotli Sattian. For a generation we were told that the future of Murree was concrete. It was not. The future of Murree is soil, water, altitude and the knowledge our grandparents never lost.

Before 1851, the area then called Mussiarri was forest and steep hillside held by the Dhund Abbasi tribes. Farming was small and practical: maize and wheat on terraced plots, with livestock, walnuts and forest produce. Then the British founded a sanatorium and summer station here, and for a time in the 1870s Murree served as the summer seat of the Punjab government. Murree Brewery followed in 1860, near Ghora Gali. The new residents wanted the food of home, so the hills were turned toward European crops: potatoes, cabbage and turnips, and above all temperate fruit. Cherries, peaches, pears, plums, strawberries and raspberries were grown here because the plains of Punjab could not grow them. Apples took root in the upper villages, and stone terracing was encouraged to hold soil on the steep slopes. Whatever one thinks of the Raj, it understood something we have forgotten: Murree’s climate is its capital.

Our elders tell more than the records do. They remember terraced fields in the wetter valleys where rice was grown, stepped down the hillside the way it is in Vietnam, southern China and the Andes of Peru. They remember maize cobs drying on rooftops, walnut trees at every boundary, and a household economy in which a family ate what it grew and sold the surplus down the road to Rawalpindi. After 1947, the hills stayed largely agrarian for a generation. Tourism was an addition, not a replacement. A family might rent a room in summer while the fields continued underneath.

I will not invent statistics for those decades, because exact district-level production figures for 1947 to 1980 are scattered and hard to find. That is itself part of the tragedy. We stopped measuring agriculture in Murree because we stopped valuing it. The Punjab Agriculture Department and the Pakistan Agricultural Research Council should be asked a simple question: how many hectares were under crops in 1960, in 1980, and today?

From roughly the 1980s onward, the logic of the hills changed. The road improved, the middle class of Islamabad and Rawalpindi grew, and visitors multiplied. Land that produced apples and maize could suddenly fetch a far larger one-time payment as a hotel site. Politicians promised roads, plazas and “development.” The contractor became the local hero, and the farmer became an embarrassment.

Consider the arithmetic of that bargain. A family sells an orchard or terrace for a lump sum. The money goes on a house, a wedding, a vehicle, a rented shop. Within a decade it is gone, and so is the land, and so is the only asset that could have paid every year forever. The buyer, often from outside, builds, sells again, and profits at each step. The seller is left as a caretaker, a driver or a labourer on land his grandfather farmed. Meanwhile every cut for a plot or a road loosens a slope that terrace walls once held. Forests have thinned, springs have weakened, and landslides have grown more frequent and more deadly. The snow-trapped traffic of recent winters showed what overbuilding on a fragile ridge does to a town. And in most of Murree today, not one kilogram of rice is grown. Where fields once held water and green shoots, there is scrub, a boundary wall, or a signboard that reads “Plots for Sale.”