According to the Punjab Agriculture Department, kharif crops cover about 18 million acres of farmland in the province each year. This season, around 1.3 million acres are under water, less than eight percent of the total.
This is not to diminish the devastation faced by farming families on those 1.3 million acres. But to claim that 60 percent of rice and a third of cotton or sugarcane have been wiped out by flooding is a gross misrepresentation. Such claims stem from ignorance, deliberate exaggeration, or lobbying for bailouts in the form of tax relief, fiscal transfers, or softer credit under the cover of ‘emergency.’
Make no mistake: 1.3 million acres lost is serious. Per-acre revenues for kharif crops range from Rs150,000 to Rs350,000, which means at least Rs300 billion in standing crops may have vanished. That is a staggering hit to household incomes, rural communities, and the provincial economy. Yet in aggregate, it is still less than 10 percent of Punjab’s kharif output.
Even so, small percentages matter. Destruction of even five percent of acreage in any major crop can move prices sharply and feed directly into headline inflation. Yet far too often, the conversation too quickly shifts to consumer prices - which primarily affect urban populations –and away from the revenue and asset losses of farming families who have lost everything. Their crisis is existential, not merely economic.
The geography of the losses tells its own story. With less than eight percent of cultivated land submerged, it is the low-lying tracts, floodplains, katcha, and riverbeds that have been inundated. This brings us back to a point made before: if policymaking aims to mitigate the impact of shocks such as climate volatility, we must begin the hard work of getting out of water’s way. These lands should never have been intensively farmed. Their best use is as natural recharge basins for groundwater and soils, not short-term cash machines for rice and cane.
This transition will not happen overnight. Farmers forced to leave the floodplain will demand equally productive land, and rightly so.
But rather than handing out shoes and caps in relief camps like a modern-day Khalifa Haroon Rashid, the state must begin the hard work of rethinking human infrastructure in high-risk zones and committing the costly task of permanently relocating populations and settlements away from them. It must also impose an immediate ban on cultivation in floodplains during peak risk months between June and September.
Consider this: if floods now strike every two years instead of every decade, why would any rational lender finance farms in floodplains? Even if crop insurance were common in Pakistan, premiums for such land would be astronomical. No serious insurer would price that risk cheaply. Pretending otherwise is lying to farmers about their future.
And if this land is truly ‘too productive to lose,’ then why not rethink what it grows? Horticulture or fodder sown after the monsoon and harvested by June are possible. Punjab’s nine-month window is long enough for two shorter-cycle crops. Yes, land may lose value. But land values shift everywhere: after every new canal, every new motorway, every new scheme. Is it really the end of the world if they shift because of climate?
The federal cabinet may have declared a climate emergency, but the real emergency is a lack of imagination in Islamabad. Why must we remain stuck in colonial-era cropping patterns or donor templates from half a century ago? The ‘normal’ has changed. Our farming choices have not.
Yes, rich nations owe Pakistan climate justice. But our low carbon footprint is not a badge of honor; it is a symptom of underdevelopment. Floods would have come even if Pakistan had industrialized alongside others. Would we still insist responsibility lies elsewhere while our farmers drowned?
Climate volatility is here. The only question is whether Pakistan chooses adaptation and imagination, or keeps waiting with a begging bowl, rehearsing the same excuses while farmers and fields wash away.
Copyright Business Recorder, 2025