LAHORE: The Punjab government is working to incorporate Artificial Intelligence (AI) into the daily lives of farmers as the leadership believes that data and technological transformation can help improve agricultural productivity and farmers’ incomes.
Parliamentary Secretary for Agriculture Osama Leghari stated this while speaking as chief guest at the Pakistan Agricultural Coalition’s Agri Connections Conference and Expo at the Lahore Expo Centre on Thursday.
“I hope that during the remaining two-and-a-half years of our tenure, we will successfully lay the foundation through which our farmers will have access to AI and will be able to forecast their yields and productivity,” said Osama. He said the Punjab government had declared the current year as the “Year of the Value Chain”.
“We are encouraging our partners, and I would certainly like to encourage our corporate sector, to get involved with farmers, work with them, and add value to their products so that the middleman is eliminated, the farmer gets a greater share, and the corporate sector also ends up making a profit,” he added.
Advisor to the Federal Finance Minister Adnan Pasha said Pakistan, besides traditional security challenges, was facing two existential threats – climate change and population growth – which were closely linked with food and water security as well as wider social challenges.
“In the next two decades, we may be crossing 370 million or maybe 390 million, so there’s an opportunity, and the opportunity can be converted from risks that we’ll be talking about and trying to address in the next two decades,” he said.
He said Pakistan’s agricultural transformation could not be financed through the public-sector balance sheet alone, stressing the need for public-private partnerships in which the government provides the ecosystem and a risk-sharing baseline.
He said the World Bank had worked with the government of Pakistan under its new Country Partnership Framework which included a dedicated focus on the agriculture-climate nexus, linking climate resilience, water, agriculture, and food and nutrition security with private-sector investment.
“This creates the opportunity to build investable pipelines and projects, rather than just isolated projects, so it has to work together,” said Adnan. He identified certified climate-resilient seeds as one area requiring private investment, particularly in multiplication, processing, testing and distribution of seeds suited to heat, drought, floods and disease. He said water was another key driver, stressing that Pakistan could not achieve sustainable food security while treating water as an unlimited input.
“We need more economic and nutritional value from every unit of water we already have with improved on-farm water management and water-saving agronomy,” he added.
The Chief Executive of Pakistan Agricultural Coalition, Kazim Saeed, in his welcome address, said the conference, held in partnership with Punjab’s Agriculture Department, provided a platform to explore ways to accelerate development of the agriculture sector.
He said the world was changing rapidly, with growing protectionism, traditional alliances changing and new regional partnerships emerging, while capital flows were also seeking new pathways.
“In this environment, we at Pakistan Agricultural Coalition started thinking about opportunities for Pakistan by looking at how the countries of Europe set an example of cooperation on food security in the fast-changing world after the Second World War,” he said.
“We do realize that Pakistan’s agriculture needs leadership today. We are importing the commodities we have grown for millennia – wheat, cotton, lentils, etc. Our exports are a fraction of what they can be partly because of low competitiveness and partly due to food safety concerns,” said Kazim.
During a session held in partnership with the World Bank on “Food Security in Changing Trade Dynamics”, Olivier Durand, Lead Agriculture Specialist at the World Bank, said agricultural production in Pakistan remained highly fragmented compared with several other countries.
“What we’re seeing in Pakistan as compared to other countries is that it’s very, very fragmented production,” he said.
He said Pakistan had a large number of small farmers who were not fully connected to markets and were not well organised or linked with off-takers, processors and other market players. “And you all know that we have many, many smaller farmers, very fragmented, not really fully connected to the markets, not well organized, not well connected to off-takers, to markets, processors, and so on. And that’s a huge difference with other countries like Egypt and Morocco,” he said.
He termed market accessibility for small farmers a major issue, saying it also affected Pakistan’s trade prospects.
“But what is accessible to people? It’s mainly the wheat and the wheat flour. But if you look at the affordability of a healthy diet, you see that on the graph it’s pretty difficult for 60percent of the population in Pakistan to afford a healthy diet,” said Olivier.
He said Pakistan had succeeded in doubling agricultural production over the past 30 years and had caught up with middle-income countries in the MENA region, including Morocco and Egypt, but remained far behind other middle-income countries in terms of fruit and vegetable production.
Siham Jabrane of OCP Morocco made a presentation on “How input markets are impacting food security”, while Syngenta Pakistan also made a presentation.
Speaking at the conference, Zeeshan Baig, Country General Manager, Syngenta Pakistan, said Pakistan would increasingly need to produce more food from declining water resources as population growth and pressure on agricultural productivity raise the stakes for the country’s future food security.
He said the challenge facing agriculture was no longer simply how to increase production, but how to generate greater and more sustainable output from increasingly constrained land, water and other natural resources.
Copyright Business Recorder, 2026
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