What the food security meetings never discuss

Reliable water delivery is the precondition for every other agricultural reform. We have been ignoring it.

Pakistan spends billions on agricultural reform and still cannot reliably feed itself. The reason is not only in the seed, the soil, or the farmer. It is in the canal.

Every year, Pakistan rediscovers its food security crisis. Food prices rise. Imports are debated. Subsidies are recalibrated. Procurement targets are announced. The conversation moves on until the next cycle of shortage and anxiety returns.

Almost never does the discussion reach the place where the problem actually begins: the irrigation system that feeds, or fails to feed, the country’s crops.

This omission reflects a quiet but damaging assumption: water is treated as a technical sector to be left to engineers, while food security is treated as a strategic matter worthy of national attention. The result is endless meetings about food, but far fewer serious conversations about whether water actually reaches farms.

That distinction must now end. Pakistan’s food security crisis is, at its foundation, a water-delivery and systems-reliability crisis.

The agronomic reality is unforgiving. Wheat, Pakistan’s staple food, needs water at biologically specific moments. Stress at tillering, flowering, or grain filling causes losses that no subsequent input can recover.

A wheat crop at flowering cannot negotiate with a canal schedule.

This is not a metaphor. It is plant physiology.

In a country where the overwhelming share of agricultural output comes from irrigated land, reliable irrigation is not one input among many. It is the foundation that determines whether every other input, including seed, fertiliser, credit and machinery, translates into harvests or wasted investment. A high-yield seed planted in an unreliable canal command produces ordinary results at extraordinary cost. Fertiliser applied to a moisture-stressed crop is often money wasted. Climate-smart farming, however well-designed, cannot compensate for water that does not arrive when crops need it.

Yet Pakistan’s food security strategy continues to behave as if canal reliability were a secondary issue. Large sums are committed to seed development, mechanisation schemes, climate adaptation pilots, and farmer credit programmes. But they are being layered on top of an irrigation system weakened by under-maintenance, uneven delivery, poor measurement, and growing dependence on groundwater as a substitute for failed surface supplies.

The result is predictable. Inputs underperform. Yields disappoint. Food prices rise. Farmers borrow more. Households cut back. Decision makers then ask why so much public money has produced so little structural change.

Across Pakistan’s tail-end canal commands, children are being raised on harvests that decades of deferred maintenance and unreliable delivery have been quietly reducing. Families in these communities are not poor because they farm badly. They are poor because the water their land is legally allocated rarely arrives in full, and rarely arrives on time.

The answer is in front of us. Until canal delivery becomes reliable, until tail-end farmers receive the water legally allocated to them, until water deliveries are measured transparently, and until groundwater is regulated as a finite resource rather than treated as an unlimited emergency reserve, agricultural reform will keep producing less than promised.

The tail-end problem is often misunderstood. The common explanation is that politically influential head-end farmers capture water at the expense of poorer farmers downstream. This happens, but it is only part of the story. The deeper problem is hydraulic and structural. Many canals no longer carry their designed capacity because decades of deferred maintenance have degraded the system. Siltation, weak embankments, damaged outlets, poor regulation, and unreliable monitoring all reduce delivery before water reaches the end of the command.

A large landholder at the tail suffers the same physics as a smallholder there.

This has created a destructive cycle. Farmers who cannot trust their legal allocation try to secure water whenever they can. Unauthorised extraction is not only a story of power. It is a rational survival response inside a system no one trusts. Once trust collapses, every farmer has an incentive to take more than his share. The canal then becomes not a predictable public system, but a contested race against uncertainty.

Pakistan has not lacked policy frameworks. The Punjab Water Policy of 2018, the Punjab Water Act of 2019, and the Punjab Irrigation, Drainage and Rivers Act of 2023 all reflected a growing recognition that water governance requires institutional reform rather than perpetual crisis management. But legislation is only the beginning. Implementation has repeatedly been slowed by bureaucratic inertia, fragmented institutional ownership, political turnover, and shifting government priorities.

Pakistan has also learned that reform cannot succeed through new laws alone, or through imported institutional models that ignore local realities. Some externally supported irrigation management reforms produced unintended consequences, including weak financial accountability, declining maintenance standards, and localised capture of water distribution. The lesson is not that reform is impossible, but that it works only when responsibility is clear, maintenance is enforced, and local water distribution reflects how the system actually functions.

The deeper reason canal maintenance remains underfunded is not technical ignorance alone. It is political visibility. A highway can be inaugurated. A building can be photographed. A rehabilitated distributary at the tail end of a canal command, anywhere in Pakistan, rarely generates a press release or a ribbon-cutting. The communities most dependent on functioning canals are typically the most remote, the most politically marginalised, and the least represented in the spaces where budget decisions are made.

Their shortages are real but silent. They are absorbed season after season as misfortune rather than policy failure. Until rural water deprivation becomes as politically visible as urban infrastructure, it will continue to lose the budget competition to projects that can be displayed on camera.

The most immediate reform is therefore not glamorous, but it is transformative: make tail-end water delivery equitable, measurable, and enforceable. Pakistan already has legal allocations. What it lacks is a delivery system that can reliably honour them.

Rehabilitating canals, measuring deliveries transparently, and documenting where allocated water never reaches farmers would turn hidden deprivation into recorded failure. It would shift the food security debate from emergency response to system correction. Under-delivery should become an accountable failure of public administration, not an invisible burden carried by farmers alone.

This would cost far less than the expenditure already poured into agricultural schemes whose returns are weakened by unreliable water. A canal-reliability programme would also unlock the value of investments Pakistan has already made in seed, fertiliser, mechanisation, credit, and climate adaptation.

Pakistan can no longer discuss food security, agricultural productivity, climate resilience, groundwater depletion, and rural poverty as separate issues. In this country, they are increasingly the same conversation.

The future of Pakistan’s food system will depend not only on how much water flows through the Indus Basin, but on whether the state can deliver that water to farms when crops need it. No subsidy, seed programme, or climate initiative can compensate for canals that fail at the critical moment.

A country that cannot reliably deliver water to its crops will eventually struggle to deliver food security to its people.

Copyright Business Recorder, 2026