Rice: the dark horse

The more any sector operates in the documented sector, the more public scrutiny it attracts. Or at least that’s the lesson sugar millers should draw from their brethren in the rice milling business.

Accurate figures on capacity installed or number of rice mills are hard to come by; by some accounts, number of units goes into several hundreds. Most of these units are held as private-limited entities, and due to their medium scale, do no attract significant attention. Thus, the dearth of hard data.

Consider this: the 87 odd sugar milling units installed in the country have come to be defined as all that is wrong with Pakistan’s agriculture. It is correct that Pakistan produces sugar in excess which is often hard to offload in export market without government support. However, to argue that sugar and cane farming has blossomed by piggy-backing on cotton cultivation, the purported backbone of textile exports, is a red herring.

Punjab’s district wise agricultural land utilization census indicates that the mushroom growth of paddy has come to pose a formidable challenge to fibre crop in recent years. A decade ago, Punjab’s rural lands were almost neatly fragmented between sugarcane and rice farming concentrated in central Punjab, and cotton in the southern districts.

However, for factors explained in these pages previously, cotton lost its attraction to farmers as they switched to crops with higher returns. During the five-year period from FY13 and FY17, the white gold crop literally lost ground, or one-fourth of area under cultivation.

But, surprise surprise! In sharp contrast to the popular view peddled in the media, it is rice and not sugarcane that has made most significant in-roads into southern Punjab. While both crops have consistently improved their share in land utilization in the region, rice’s gain is 60 percent higher and more prominent in comparison.

A closer look at numbers from central Punjab seems to offer an explanation for the populist view, which lays the blame squarely on sugarcane. After all, cotton’s loss in area is further magnified when looked on pan-Punjab basis.

Except, all three competing crops have lost share in central region, which once stood on equal footing for cultivated farm-land with the south. However, with rapid urbanization in the central districts, it appears that central’s share in crop output is falling, with the steepest decline recorded for cotton.

Thus, cotton’s big picture (province wide) decline is hence incorrectly compared with setting up of mills in southern districts, leading to the misinterpretation that sugarcane is to blame. But if one were to pick the real winners in the province, the dark horses are most definitely the rice growers.