Pakistan treats wheat procurement as a provincial matter. The market does not.

A procurement failure in Punjab travels. It moves through flour prices in Peshawar, through grain flows to Quetta, through the availability of strategic reserves for regions that produce little wheat of their own. Wheat may be grown, purchased and stored inside provincial boundaries. But it feeds a federation. That is why the crisis of 2026 cannot be understood as four separate procurement problems that happened to occur in the same season.It is one problem. It just has four faces.

Punjab dominates Pakistan's wheat debate because Punjab dominates Pakistan's wheat production. Provincial estimates place Punjab's 2025-26 output at roughly 22 million tonnes of a national projection of 29.31 million tonnes. That is not a large provincial share. It is the surplus on which the national wheat balance rests.

When that surplus province fails its farmers at harvest, the consequences do not stay inside its borders.

Punjab chose the market route. The argument was defensible. But the transition exposed the fragility of a financing and institutional structure that was still incomplete when the crop arrived. Commercial banks hesitated. Aggregator capacity developed unevenly. The Punjab Food Department withdrew from its traditional role faster than the replacement system could operate at scale. The result was a market that existed on paper before it existed in the field.

Sindh retained the state as the direct buyer. Procurement centres, official targets, and administrative structures. Yet speed and scale failed in the crucial opening weeks. By late April, the government had to remove restrictions that had limited small growers to five bags per........

© The Friday Times