With the only exception of New Zealand where wheat yield is nine tonnes per hectare, for most other major wheat-producing countries the yield remains in the range of three to six tonnes per hectare. In India, the yield is four tonnes per hectare and in China six tonnes.

Pakistan’s wheat yield is close to three tonnes. If it does not rise gradually to six tonnes in 10 years, our food security can be compromised. But this doubling of the yield is not possible if the country fails to formulate a national grow-more-wheat programme now and implement it meticulously year after year. But that requires full harmony between the federal and provincial authorities and clear demarcation of the lines of ownership of the programme.

That cannot happen in the near future. Federal and provincial authorities, under the watch of powerful civil-military establishment, are yet to review the 18th Constitutional Amendment that gave provinces greater autonomy and made agriculture a fully provincial subject a decade ago. This is a big impediment to revolutionising the entire agriculture sector of which food crops’ management is only a part.

If yield does not rise gradually from the current level of about three tonnes to six tonnes per hectare in 10 years, our food security can be compromised

Another impediment is the absence of provincial-level initiatives to strike a balance between the imperative of national food security and political interests that play a pivotal role in setting short-term policy priorities.

Pakistan’s wheat-yield surpassed the 2.5 tonnes-per-hectare level back in 2005 and has since ranged between 2.5 and 3 tonnes with little yearly variations, data furnished in annual economic surveys of Pakistan reveals.

This does not mean that in the past 15 years, the nation has not developed higher-yielding wheat varieties or new crop management techniques have not been adopted. It means that on a national level, the focus has remained more on harvesting a “bumper” wheat crop instead of making substantial and sustainable gains in wheat yield.

In the last decade and a half, the area under wheat crop has remained range-bound between eight and nine million hectares and there is not much room for increasing the expanse of wheat cultivation without taking a hit on sugarcane or rice. For the last few years, some squeezing of the area under sugarcane cultivation occurred to make room for rice.

Rebalancing allocation of areas under cultivation of key food crops definitely helps in obtaining the required volume of a certain crop but that is not a lasting solution for taking the total output of that crop to the desired level year after year. According to a status paper of Pakistan Agricultural Research Council (PARC), prepared during the previous PML-N government, Pakistan’s wheat requirement would reach close to 31.5m tonnes in 2025 and would exceed 34m tonnes by 2030. The projections are based on the assumption that population growth rate would average 1.8 per cent, the per-person wheat requirement would be 120kg per year and the country would keep at least 1m tonnes in food security reserves.

For the just-concluded 2019-20, Pakistan’s wheat output is estimated at 25.6m tonnes, 1.4m short of the target of 27m tonnes. The shortage occurred despite a 1pc plus increase in the targeted area under cultivation and less than 1pc increase in the yield. A more worrisome fact is after hitting an all-time high of 26.7m tonnes in 2016-17, Pakistan’s wheat output declined in the next two years both due to shrinkage in the area under cultivation and a drop in the yield.

Regardless of all mismanagement and even corruption in wheat handling in Pakistan, which creates repeated wheat flour crisis, two decisive factors stand out. First, it is wrongly assumed that our national wheat requirement is around 26m tonnes and crop output exceeding this level is “bumper”. And second, a decent increase in the yield like that of 7pc in 2016-17 is never sustained.

According to PARC status report our total wheat requirement was projected at 28.8m tonnes for 2020. Officials of the Ministry of National Food Security and Research admitted in a working paper prepared recently that in 2021 total wheat requirement would 27.5m tonnes. It was on the basis of that projection that the government allowed immediate wheat imports.

The federal government must make — and share with the nation — more realistic wheat requirement projections along with precise plans on achieving sustainable growth in wheat yields.

For taking the per-hectare yield of wheat gradually from the current level of below 3m tonnes to 6m tonnes within a decade, it is necessary to make more financial allocations for food security and crop research. Provinces also need to draw their own provincial-level grow-more-wheat programmes and ensure that provincial yearly yield rises to the level where it can impact favourably on average national yield.

Since 2005, per-hectare yield in Sindh has remained higher than in other provinces. In 2017-18, Sindh provincial average wheat yield was 3.3 tonnes per-hectare ahead of 2.9 tonnes for Punjab, 2.4 tonnes for Balochistan and below two tonnes for Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. All provinces need to learn from yield-boosting experiences of Sindh.

Meanwhile, the federal government needs to oversee the entire national grow-more-wheat programme not in an authoritarian way but in the spirit of creating synergy among all stakeholders. And, it must take provinces on board regarding all its efforts targeted at seeking Chinese cooperation in agriculture as part of the Chinese Pakistan Economic Corridor phase 2.

In Sindh and Balochistan, provincial authorities complain that the federal government has not yet shared with them all the details of the Pakistan-China agreement of agricultural cooperation signed earlier this year. This is a serious issue and must be dealt with seriously. Lack of transparency can frustrate provincial governments as well as our foreign agricultural development partners including the USA. —MA

Published in Dawn, The Business and Finance Weekly, August 10th, 2020