Worrisome export fall

EDITORIAL: When the Uraan Pakistan initiative was launched at the tail end of 2024, it envisioned transforming the country into a trillion-dollar economy by 2035, with export growth as its cornerstone.

The plan envisaged the country achieving highly audacious export targets of USD60 billion by FY2028-29 and USD100 billion over the next seven to eight years.

A meeting of the National Assembly Standing Committee on Commerce on June 2, however, has thrown into sharp relief just how far reality has drifted from aspiration. JUI-F MNA Aliya Kamran pointedly questioned why exports had not only stagnated, but regressed in the 1.5 years since Uraan’s launch.

Over the first 10 months of FY2025-26, exports plunged to USD25.21 billion, a six percent decline from USD26.89 billion in the same period last year.

How the architects of the Uraan programme expect the country to vault to its lofty export targets will remain a mystery unless a fundamental structural transformation takes root that pulls the export sector out of its chronic dependence on low-value, low-complexity goods and equips it to compete in an increasingly volatile domestic and global environment.

The commerce secretary’s intervention at the meeting offered some explanation for the regression, painting a picture of an industrial sector buckling under a punishing cost burden: energy tariffs among the highest in the region, prohibitive financing costs, a byzantine and punitive taxation regime, and steep input and transportation costs that have collectively eroded the export sector’s productivity and international competitiveness, making Pakistan one of the most expensive places in the region to do business, let alone export from.

The volatile security environment along our borders and across the wider region hasn’t helped matters either.

The rupture in relations with Afghanistan has stripped away approximately USD850 million in exports and transit earnings. Meanwhile, the US-Israel war on Iran threatens to carve out a further USD600 million in exports to GCC markets, while also simultaneously driving up logistics and energy costs, further eroding the competitiveness of local producers.

The impact of these external shocks has only magnified the fragility of an export base already operating under severe strain.

If Pakistan is serious about its export ambitions, root-and-branch reform of the energy sector and taxation structure is where that seriousness must first be demonstrated through the rationalising of punishing energy tariffs, and dismantling a tax playbook built around minimum taxation on turnover and a withholding regime that extracts its pound of flesh at every stage of commercial activity.

But these structural reforms alone will not move the needle without an equally radical shift in approach of both businesses and government that abandons the deeply entrenched default disposition of selling domestic surpluses abroad.

What Pakistan needs is a deliberate, forward-looking export philosophy that identifies where global demand is heading, builds productive capacity around it and positions Pakistani industry as a supplier of choice in that area.

The constricted, reactive vision that has kept Pakistan tethered to the bottom of the export value chain – a commodity-driven basket dominated by basic textiles and raw or semi-processed goods that the world has long since moved beyond paying a premium for – must give way to a decisive move up the value chain. That means upgrading product quality and manufacturing processes to meet evolving global standards, investing in market intelligence to track shifting consumer preferences and tightening regulatory requirements across key export destinations, and building the kind of institutional capacity in branding, innovation, technology adoption and supply-chain reliability that regional competitors built years ago.

Pakistan must summon the political will and institutional courage to rebuild its export economy from the ground up; otherwise, the USD100 billion export target will remain just a number on paper.

Copyright Business Recorder, 2026