The farmer does not leave wheat out of sentiment. He leaves when the arithmetic forces him to.

In Okara, in Sahiwal, and in parts of Bahawalpur and Rahim Yar Khan, that arithmetic has already been done. Canola and mustard on the same acre, with similar input costs, have offered returns several times higher than wheat over the past two seasons, without the procurement uncertainty, without the benchmark price that functions in practice as a ceiling rather than a floor, and without the buyer who arrives after the price has already been set. The farmer who made that calculation was not abandoning Pakistan's food security. He was protecting his own.

That distinction matters. Because the nine hundred thousand acres that were left out of wheat cultivation in Punjab between 2023–24 and 2024–25 are being discussed in policy circles largely as a supply problem. They are not. They are a verdict.

Three consecutive seasons of the same failure — the system absent at harvest, the price undefended, and the liquidity reaching traders before it reached farmers — have produced a rational collective response from the people who carry the most risk and wield the least influence in Pakistan's wheat economy. The farmer has done what any market participant does when returns repeatedly fail to cover costs and the state repeatedly fails to honour its implicit commitments. He has begun to exit.

The danger is not that he is exiting. The........

© The Friday Times