On 22 August, Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif directed agricultural research institutions to strengthen their contribution to Pakistan’s agriculture sector and align their research with international standards.
The government’s stated priorities include supporting small and medium-sized farmers, increasing agricultural yields, strengthening farmers’ bargaining power and improving crop-estimation systems.
The objectives are difficult to dispute. The more important question is whether Pakistan lacks these systems in the first place, or whether the existing research, technologies and interventions actually reach farmers at scale.
Pakistan has already benefited from international and domestic agricultural modernisation initiatives. Programmes such as the FAO-IAEA Atoms4Food initiative and the AgriTech Roadmap (2025-2030) have promoted climate-resilient crop varieties, laser land levelling, high-efficiency irrigation systems (HEIS) and digital agricultural advisory services.
Nuclear technologies for crop improvement, for example, have supported the development of cotton varieties that are able to withstand heat, erratic rainfall, pests and other climate-related stresses.
Similarly, digital agriculture and ICT platforms are intended to provide farmers with access to crop information, weather forecasts, technical advice and market data. The question, therefore, is not whether these technologies and systems exist, but whether they are reaching the farmers who need them most, and whether they are translating into higher productivity, greater resilience and better incomes.
During this author’s visit to interior Sindh for the SAVAK agroforestry project, his team and he worked closely with farmers to understand the challenges they continue to face and how our programme could better respond to them. We found that several fundamental barriers still constrain agricultural productivity: limited access to climate-resilient seeds, affordable finance and insurance against floods, droughts and pests.
Farmers also have inadequate access to knowledge and extension support on soil management, particularly on addressing soil salinity.
More troublingly, many farmers remain caught in a cycle of debt and dependency.
During the growing season, when they need cash to meet immediate expenses, they often have little choice but to borrow from middlemen. Without adequate storage facilities or alternative market channels, they may then be compelled to sell immediately after harvest, precisely when prices are at their lowest. The same produce can subsequently be resold at higher prices in urban markets.
Farmers therefore bear much of the labour, production cost and climate risk while capturing only a fraction of the final value. Weak bargaining power, limited access to transparent market and price information, and the absence of farmer cooperatives further reinforce this imbalance.
Even where improved technologies are available, high upfront costs and structural market constraints prevent many smallholders from benefiting from them.
This is why strengthening farmers’ bargaining power cannot be treated simply as a matter of providing better information or technology. It also requires confronting the political economy of agricultural markets.
The sugar sector provides a particularly important test of this commitment. In July 2025, domestic sugar prices reached as high as Rs210 per kilogramme, roughly twice the international benchmark of about Rs104 per kilogramme. At the same time, reports of substantial unpaid dues to sugarcane growers highlighted the imbalance between powerful mills and the farmers supplying them.
Such cases illustrate a wider problem: agricultural reform cannot protect farmers if market concentration and unequal bargaining relationships allow powerful actors to capture a disproportionate share of value.
The arithmetic of the value chain can make this imbalance particularly visible. If a farmer receives substantially less than the official value of the cane supplied, while the processed sugar is sold far above its benchmark or competitive value, value is extracted at both ends of the chain: first from the producer and then from the consumer. Better crop estimates, digital platforms and improved seed varieties cannot, by themselves, correct that imbalance.
Agricultural modernisation therefore requires more than technology. It requires agricultural policy that responds to the needs of small and medium-sized farmers rather than serving powerful market interests. It requires access to finance, insurance, extension services, storage infrastructure and transparent markets, but it also requires the political will to reform the institutions and market arrangements that determine who ultimately benefits from agricultural growth.
Without these changes, Pakistan risks continuing to introduce sophisticated technologies without resolving the structural constraints that prevent small farmers from benefiting from them.
International interventions may modernise parts of the agricultural system, but unless access, affordability and bargaining power are addressed simultaneously, their benefits will remain concentrated among a privileged minority rather than transforming agriculture at scale.
Copyright Business Recorder, 2026
The writer is development and climate finance consultant at Resources Future - she can be reached on kiran@resourcesfuture.com