Pakistan is grappling with a dilemma. While striving to boost its rice exports to alleviate the country’s current account deficit, it faces the challenge of dwindling water resources needed to sustain the continuously increasing area of the highly water-intensive rice crop.

From FY12 to FY24, rice area has expanded from 2.57 million hectares to 3.62m hectares — reflecting a substantial growth of 40 per cent. During the same period, total rice production surged by 46pc, from 6.2m tonnes to 9m tonnes (provisional estimates of the United States Department of Agriculture for 2023-24).

In fact, the actual rice acreage is even greater than what government statistics report for the Kharif crop, as they don’t account for a recent trend in some districts where farmers are planting two rice crops from mid-April to mid-November — within a single Kharif season — under wheat-rice-rice, potato-rice-rice, and other cropping systems. The new short-duration basmati (Kissan basmati) and coarse hybrid rice varieties, which mature in under 90 days, have made this possible.

However, there is another side to this story. The ongoing increase in rice cultivation is outpacing available surface water, which is diminishing due to dam sedimentation. Consequently, indiscriminate groundwater extraction is increasing with each passing day, resulting in a continual drop in the water table. This not only degrades the quality of irrigation water but also necessitates greater energy to pump water from deeper depths.

Govt must look into short to medium term water management as surging rice farming and depleting ground water may lead to serious environment consequences

In the past, the government’s........

© Dawn Business