A pathway for Pakistan's agribusiness transformation

Pakistan does not lack agricultural strategies. What it lacks is a credible pathway for turning those strategies into investment, implementation and measurable results.

The country's agricultural challenges are well understood. Productivity remains below potential, post-harvest losses are substantial, smallholders struggle to access finance and reliable markets, value chains remain fragmented, and climate change is increasing risks to production and investment. The key question now is how the country can move beyond identifying problems to finding and implementing effective solutions.

My recent work for the ADB, including the study "Enhancing Competitiveness, Sustainability, and Resilience in Pakistan's Agribusiness Through Climate-Responsive Strategies", reinforces the need for a more competitive, sustainable and climate-resilient agricultural sector.

Pakistan needs to move away from a project-by-project approach toward a portfolio-based agribusiness investment model.

The first step should be to identify priority value chains based on their potential to generate value addition and exports, involve smallholders, create employment, withstand climate pressures and attract private investment. These priorities will necessarily differ across provinces.

Once a value chain is selected, policymakers should be able to identify where value is lost, why farmers lack financing and market access, and where transport, storage, processing, or quality standards drive up costs. Good policy begins with diagnosis, not with a predetermined solution.

Yet, Pakistan has traditionally emphasised production first and looked for markets afterward. For high-value agriculture, this approach needs to be reversed. Floriculture illustrates the point. Commercial success depends not simply on producing more flowers, but on producing the right varieties, meeting quality standards, getting the timing right, ensuring appropriate packaging and temperature control, and developing reliable relationships with buyers. The same principle applies to other high-value crops. Before producing more, farmers and investors need to know who will buy, what quality standards must be met, and whether the necessary infrastructure exists to reach those markets.

Smallholders and agribusiness SMEs also need investment in equipment, technology, cold storage, processing and climate-resilient production. But the government cannot - and should not - finance all of this itself. Its more effective role is to reduce the risks and market constraints that prevent commercially viable private investment from taking place. Partial credit guarantees, equipment leasing, value-chain finance, agricultural insurance and blended-finance mechanisms can help unlock private capital.

This comprehensive approach could be supported through Agribusiness Transformation Clusters in commercially viable locations. A horticulture cluster, for example, could connect farmers with aggregation centers, packhouses, cold-storage facilities, processors, quality-testing labs, financial institutions, research organisations, logistics providers, exporters and buyers.

The government's role would be to provide enabling infrastructure, establish standards, facilitate research and coordinate investment, while private businesses undertake commercial functions.

Equally important is how success is measured. Pakistan has often assessed development programmes by counting training sessions, loans distributed, facilities constructed and funds utilised. These elements do not necessarily demonstrate development impact. The more meaningful indicators are farmer incomes, reduced post-harvest losses, private investment, value addition, water productivity, exports, employment and climate resilience. Pakistan should begin with a manageable number of value chains and clusters, measure their results rigorously, learn from what works and what does not, and then scale successful approaches.

Pakistan's next agricultural transformation will not come from announcing more schemes, but from building investable, competitive and resilient value chains.