KARACHI: Pakistan may miss its agricultural production target for this fiscal year, which began in July, after deadly floods inundated three-fourths of farmland, industry stakeholders and observers said on Monday, following damage to rice, cotton, sugarcane and other crops.
For the fiscal year 2025-26, Pakistan’s Federal Committee on Agriculture had planned to grow 9.17 million tons of rice over three million hectares, 9.7 million tons of maize over 1.5 million hectares, 80.3 million tons of sugarcane over 1.1 million hectares and 10.2 million bales of cotton over 2.2 million hectares of farmland across the country, according to the national food ministry.
But the Pakistan Business Forum, a national forum for trade and industry in Pakistan with a representation of businessmen, agriculturists and policymakers, has warned the South Asian country’s agricultural production target for FY26 is “now in jeopardy.”
The forum has called on the government to immediately declare an ‘agricultural emergency,’ start providing interest-free loans of as much as Rs2 million to small and mid-level farmers, end encroachments along riverbanks, activate district price control committees to prevent hoarding, and authorize public and private wheat and rice imports to stabilize market prices.
“Agricultural production targets for the fiscal year are now in jeopardy, endangering food security and rural livelihoods,” PBF President Khawaja Mehboob-ur-Rehman told Arab News.
“This crisis must be treated as a wake-up call to reform our agricultural strategies. We must stop viewing floods purely as disasters and start managing them as resources.”
While the government is in the process of assessing damages and a report on losses has yet to be presented, the PBF says the floods, which resulted from heavy rains and India’s release of excess water, have damaged more than 1.3 million acres of agricultural land in the country’s breadbasket province of Punjab alone.
Faisalabad, which is also the country’s textile manufacturing hub, is the worst hit division with 300,000 acres of farmland damages, according to the PBF’s preliminary assessment. The deluges have washed away crops over 200,000 acres of land in Punjab’s Gujrat and Gujranwala, 130,000 acres in Bahawalpur, 145,000 acres in Sahiwal and 99,000 acres in Lahore division. Agricultural lands in Multan, Vehari and Khanewal districts are also said to be badly affected.
The estimates indicate losses of 60 percent of rice crop, 30 percent of sugarcane and 35 percent of cotton. The PBF says the deluges have also damaged wheat stocks in government warehouses and authorities may have to import around 5 million tons of wheat to stabilize prices at home.
The development comes as floodwaters move downstream to the southern Sindh province from Punjab, where they have killed at least 60 people and displaced millions of others since late August.
Sindh, Pakistan’s second largest crop producing province, was worst hit by the 2022 cataclysmic floods that killed more than 1,700 people nationwide and damaged crops and roads, bridges and rail infrastructure worth over $30 billion.
Ahmad Jawad, the PBF chief organizer, said the latest floods may damage Pakistan’s stabilizing economy by 0.8 percent of the gross domestic product (GDP).
“While the headline figure of 0.80 percent of GDP may appear modest from a macroeconomic perspective, this is only an initial assessment and may increase,” he told Arab News.
The devastation comes at a time when Pakistan’s government is trying to maintain the International Monetary Fund-backed recovery of its fragile economy, which was expected to expand 4.2 percent this fiscal year ending in June 2026.
Arif Habib Corporation, a Karachi-based market research and brokerage firm, has revised down its earlier 3.4 percent growth projection for this fiscal year to 3.2 percent because of the agriculture sector, which the firm expects to now expand 1.1 percent.
“Pakistan’s growth trajectory, once showing signs of recovery, is again under strain as the 2025 floods devastate the agricultural sector,” Habib said.
The firm estimates the economic cost of the latest floods to be around Rs409 billion ($1.4 billion), which is equivalent to 0.33 percent of the GDP. The agriculture, it said, had absorbed the “heaviest blow,” with losses exceeding Rs302 billion ($1 billion).
“This accounts for nearly three-fourths of the total and about 0.24 percent of GDP, reflecting the sector’s acute vulnerability to climate shocks and the risks these events pose to food security and rural livelihoods,” the brokerage firm said.
Agriculture contributes 24 percent to Pakistan’s GDP and given this weight, the extent of such damages may reflect negatively on the government’s growth targets.
Habib estimated that in FY26, flood losses to agriculture may weaken Pakistan’s trade balance by around $1.93 billion.
“The most notable pressure is expected from cotton, where domestic shortfalls could push imports” up as much as 737,000 tons, costing about $1.06 billion, according to the analyst. Pakistan’s consumer prices could increase 7.22 percent this year as floods pose risks to crop yields and food security.
His research firm said meat, rice, vegetables and sugar collectively carry around 20 percent weight in Pakistan’s consumer price index (CPI) basket and shortages of these items are likely to push up prices, which may lift its FY26 average inflation forecast to 7.2 percent from the pre-flood estimate of 5.5 percent.
“Signs of this strain are already visible,” it added.
