In order to jack up Pakistan’s agriculture exports to China in a sustainable mode, “China-led Contract Farming”, a type of agriculture commercialization or corporate farming, is gaining robust traction in Pakistan.

The activity is helping Pakistan to increase its export volume, growers training on modern liens, transfer of agriculture-based technology, high-income generation to farmers, and revamp of input and output of Agri-infrastructure. Top of all, China-led contract farming is becoming an instrument to curtail the poverty level in Pakistan. It is one of the game-changer phenomena among others that powered up China to uplift more than 800 million people from extreme poverty.

Indeed, credit goes to Chinese companies especially China Machinery Engineering Corporation (CMEC) Pakistan, which is a pioneer in Contract Farming in Pakistan.

The journey of the Pak-China agroecosystem has taken effect in the light of CPEC 2.0 agriculture cooperation under the Belt and Road Initiative’s agriculture collaborations since it was propelled by Chinese President Xi Jinping in 2013.

CMEC Pakistan, part of CMEC group (a flagship company of SINOMACH Group which is one of the largest manufacturing & trading groups in China), debuted contract farming with around 500 acres in Pakistan by launching Chilli model farms in 2020. Later it made a breakthrough by unleashing sesame contract farms in Pakistan which led sesame export to China around $400 million in 2023. It is expected that sesame exports to China will exceed $1 billion in the coming years. Meanwhile, for Sorghum crop though CMEC Pakistan is yet to initiate contract farming but made headways by germinating test plants of Sorghum with local farmers.

In the past, Pakistan’s agriculture exports were in a sorry state of affairs. An annual report titled “The State of Economy 2017-18” launched by the State Bank of Pakistan (SBP) revealed that “in the agriculture sector, out of China’s global food imports of........

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