In Punjab, a farmer makes his sowing decision the same way every year. He looks at the price the crops fetched last season and plants, accordingly. His neighbours and farmers in adjoining districts often make similar choices. The result is that a good year for a crop almost guarantees a bad one after it.

The Pakistan Bureau of Statistics records this cycle weekly, although it is rarely treated as a problem. In the week ending Jan 8, 2026, tomatoes were 57pc cheaper than a year earlier, at Rs65 per kg against Rs151. Potatoes declined by 48.71pc and onions by 41.33pc. However, by August tomatoes were more than 140pc higher year-on-year and onions more than 125pc. The same three vegetables, within a single year, moved from collapse to shortage.

This is not a weather problem. A season of high prices attracts area into a crop. That area produces a glut, depressing the price, and farmers who lost money shift out again, creating the shortage that begins the cycle. Economists have called this ‘the cobweb’ since the 1930s. It appears wherever producers must commit to an acreage months before they learn what the market will pay.

Vegetables are where this is felt most. A wheat farmer at least has a number to argue about. In October, the prime minister set an indicative support price of Rs4,500 per maund for 2027, though whether any buyer is obliged to pay it is another question. A potato farmer has no number at all and cannot store his crop and wait for a better market, because vegetables are perishable and the cold chain does not exist at scale. Pakistan produces close to 30 million tonnes of fruit and vegetables a year against less than one million tonnes of cold storage.

The province has the institutional capacity to monitor acreage and market prices. What it lacks is a system that tells growers what others intend to plant and reconsider their decisions

Thus, a price crash becomes physical waste. Post-harvest losses on perishables are commonly put at a fifth to two fifths of production. When the price falls below the cost of picking and transport, there is no reason to harvest, and the crop is abandoned in the field. A glut does not simply transfer income from farmer to consumer through lower prices. A part of it is destroyed.

Consumers are not spared either. The cycle that bankrupts a farmer in January returns as a household bill in August. Swings of this size are usually blamed on hoarding and profiteering, and sometimes that is right. More often they are last season’s sowing decisions reaching the shop.

Punjab is not short of institutional capacity. The Crop Reporting Service conducts acreage surveys for Kharif and Rabi, issues up to three estimates of area, production and yield per crop, and runs crop-cutting experiments in 5,500 villages. The Agriculture Marketing Information Service publishes daily wholesale prices of 122 commodities from 135 market committees, and the extension wing reaches farmers in every tehsil.

However, the issue lies in what these institutions count. The Crop Reporting Service measures area after the crop is in the ground. The Marketing Service reports what the market paid this morning. Neither answers the question that matters at sowing time, which is what everyone else intends to plant and what that will do to the price four months later.

Other countries treat this as a public responsibility. In the United States, the agriculture department surveys farmers’ planting intentions in early March and publishes them as the Prospective Plantings report, the first official estimate of how acreage will be allocated that year. No farmer is told what to plant, only what others are planning, early enough to reconsider their decisions.

Japan has gone further. Its vegetable price stabilisation system compensates farmers for most of the decline when prices fall below a historical average. In return, they are expected not to exceed target planting areas, allocated regionally, then to prefectural federations and finally to local cooperatives. This is expensive and depends on cooperatives Punjab does not have.

The American model is within reach and requires no new department. What is missing is a section, not an institution. A market intelligence function in the agriculture department could use the Crop Reporting Service’s survey capacity to ask farmers what they intend to sow, weigh it against carry-over stocks, trade conditions and past prices, and issue an advisory before the sowing window closes. The extension wing already has the footprint to deliver it.

A beginning should be made with four crops. Potato, onion, tomato and chilli account for most of the volatility and the losses, and all are high-value crops the province intends to expand. An advisory telling a farmer in Okara that potato intentions are already 20pc above last year is no restriction on what he plants. It is the one piece of information he has no other way of obtaining.

Punjab has spent years building the capacity to measure its agriculture accurately. That measurement, however, is backward-looking. Turning part of it to look ahead is a modest administrative decision and would do more for farmer incomes than any support price the province cannot afford to pay.

The writer is a senior research analyst at The Urban Sector Planning and Management Services Unit (Urban Unit), Lahore.

Published in Dawn, The Business and Finance Weekly, November 9th, 2026