The Hands That Feed a Nation

Summary

• The creditor knows when payment is due even when the farmer does not.
• A farmer who plants again after losing his crop is not necessarily proof that the system works.
• They will do so not because every season has rewarded them, but because the next season cannot wait.

AI Generated Summary

Before the first light reaches the minarets of Badshahi mosque in Lahore someone is already working in the fields. By the time Islamabad opens its offices and a mother in Karachi prepares breakfast for her children, that work has been under way for hours. We praise the hands that feed Pakistan. We rarely ask what remains in those hands when the harvest has been sold.

Agriculture contributes nearly a quarter of our economy and employs more than a third of its workforce. In 2025–26, farmers produced 29.6 million tonnes of wheat and a record 89.45 million tonnes of sugarcane. Their work also fills the country’s rice sacks, vegetable stalls, fruit markets and milk cans. This abundance is so familiar that we mistake it for security. A country can have a successful harvest without its farmers having a successful year.

The Agricultural Census 2024 reveals how precarious their position has become. Pakistan has 11.1 million farms, compared with 8.26 million in 2010, but the average holding has fallen to 5.3 acres. Almost six in ten farms are smaller than two and a half acres. Nearly five million holdings are fragmented, often spread across separate plots. The farm is shrinking. The bills are not.

As a South Punjab farmer, I know the difference between losing money one season and losing the means to cultivate the next. A larger farmer may store grain, spread losses across fields or draw on savings. On a small holding, a single disappointing harvest can consume the money intended for seed, daughter’s dowry and the next crop. A bag of DAP costs around Rs17,000. The tractor operator, labourer and input dealer cannot all be paid with promises about what the crop might fetch.

The creditor knows when payment is due even when the farmer does not.

There are risks no farmer can control. The 2022 floods caused more than $30 billion in damage and economic losses across Pakistan. In 2025, another season of flooding affected an estimated 2.67 million acres of cropped land. The visible damage was to fields, houses, animals and irrigation channels. The less visible damage came afterward: the borrowing needed to clear silt, repair a watercourse and plant again.