In Pakistan, wheat is never just a crop. It is a mirror—held up to the state’s anxieties, the IMF’s experiments, and the farmer’s faith in something more stable than monsoon skies. Wheat here is an old relationship, older than many of the institutions that now claim dominion over it. And like any long relationship, it comes with its own patterns: dependence, intervention, withdrawal, relapse. In the Rabi season of 2025-26, that pattern feels painfully familiar.
A year ago, Pakistan was being told—sternly, directly—that its wheat market needed to finally grow up. The International Monetary Fund had pressed a finger onto an old bruise: the support price. For decades the wheat support price functioned as the country’s most expensive security blanket, a subsidy that began in 1968 and grew until it was almost indistinguishable from the political economy itself. In 2024, the Fund declared the ritual over. No more provincial price-setting. No more massive borrowing. No more games of strategic storage. It was time, they said, to let the market breathe.
Twelve months later, the same IMF that prescribed a cold-turkey exit returned with a more forgiving stance—if not forgiveness itself. After the floods ripped through crops, submerged fields, and destabilised already-fragile supply expectations, the IMF allowed the government to return to the wheat market. Not dramatically, not nostalgically, but significantly: 6.2 million tonnes of procurement at an indicative price of Rs3,500 per 40kg. Not the fixed “support price” of the old era, but something close enough to feel familiar.
Against this oscillation—withdrawal and return—the only part of the system working with any semblance of logic has been the seed distribution effort. As sowing accelerates across provinces, the state’s provision of certified seeds, convoy tracking, and enforcement of movement SOPs has begun to resemble what good agricultural governance might look like. Methodical. Bounded. Helpful without distorting the market.
Which raises the question this story explores: if one year of deregulation and one year of reversal both reveal the same truth, why must Pakistan keep repeating the wheat support cycle? Perhaps the government’s role should be exactly what this year’s sowing drive demonstrates—ensuring seeds, information, and coordination—and nothing more. The wheat itself may do better once the state steps back.
- 2024: The Year the IMF Told Pakistan to Step Away From Its Wheat
When the IMF delivered its prescription in September 2024, it wasn’t just an economic command—it was an indictment. For decades, Pakistan had been treating wheat procurement as a kind of seasonal absolution. The Punjab Government, the country’s largest player and the most enthusiastic participant in this ritual, issued a support price every year with a confidence that belied the underlying mechanics: massive borrowing from commercial banks, annual circular debt, redundant storage costs, and a political logic that made the system nearly impossible to reform.
The numbers from 2023 alone show why the IMF’s patience cracked.
Punjab procured around 40 lakh tonnes of wheat at Rs3,900 per maund (about Rs97.5 per kilogram). To pay farmers this amount, the provincial government required Rs394 billion—a sum it did not possess. So it borrowed the money. At 23% interest, those borrowings ballooned into around Rs90 billion in monthly installments over ten months, paid back mainly through sales to flour mills at the same set price.
Even this would have been merely inefficient if that were the end of the story. But it wasn’t. Punjab—and other provinces—persistently procured more wheat than they needed, carrying residual stocks from previous years even as they borrowed more to buy new grain. Storage, transportation, and handling through agencies such as PASSCO added tens of billions in additional costs. And the state repeatedly missed repayment deadlines to banks, accumulating a circular debt that by 2020 had reached Rs757 billion.
Yet the official justification stayed the same: “security” for small farmers and “cheap flour” for consumers. The reality, as an extensive academic literature has long argued, was far from this noble framing. The support price disproportionately benefited larger landowners and politically connected intermediaries. Small farmers were often forced to sell to private buyers far below the set price and long before government procurement even began. The “subsidy” supposedly meant for them ended up elsewhere, absorbed into the patronage networks and storage inefficiencies that defined Pakistan’s grain bureaucracy.
That is why the IMF insisted the intervention needed to stop. Wheat markets, they argued, behave better when they are allowed to behave like markets. Prices settle where supply meets demand, farmers choose crops more rationally, and governments focus on market infrastructure instead of market manipulation.
The IMF’s September 2024 ban on provincial governments setting wheat prices thus became the symbolic centrepiece of its $7 billion programme with Pakistan. This wasn’t a technical condition tucked into an appendix—it was a marquee reform, the kind the Fund could point to and say: here is a distortion being removed, here is fiscal discipline being restored, here is a step toward a more productive agricultural sector.
Punjab, perhaps recognising the seriousness of the moment, even abolished its provincial food department and replaced it with an autonomous body. That was no small gesture. It was the administrative equivalent of breaking an old instrument so one cannot be tempted to play the old tune again.
And for a moment—just a brief moment—the wheat market responded. With the state stepping out, prices began behaving unpredictably but honestly. When restrictions on procurement kicked in, wheat prices tumbled, falling as low as Rs2,200 per 40kg from peaks of around Rs5,500. Pain for farmers? Yes. Correction for the market? Also yes. This was deregulation in its rawest form: disorienting but clarifying.
By the end of 2024, it seemed like Pakistan had taken its first genuine step toward breaking a 56-year-old addiction.
But markets do not move in straight lines, and neither does Pakistan’s political economy. Both turned sharply within a year.
- 2025: Floods, Volatility, and the IMF’s Return to Familiar Ground
Nature tends to ignore IMF reform timetables. By mid-2025, as floods ripped through crops, submerged regions already struggling with infrastructure collapse, and pushed sowing calendars into chaos, the wheat market that had been left to “find itself” suddenly confronted a different reality: diminished crop expectations, rising anxieties about domestic supply, and a political atmosphere thick with calls for state intervention.
The IMF, which had previously insisted on a strict no-procurement regime, now recalibrated. In October 2025—almost exactly a year after its ban—the Fund allowed Pakistan to step back into the wheat market. Not freely, but meaningfully enough to reshape the season.
The government announced it would procure 6.2 million tonnes of wheat. The price would be Rs3,500 per 40kg, which officials insisted was not a traditional support price but an “indicative rate”—linked loosely to international trends and open to revision. Linguistically, this was a hedge. Economically, it was a return to intervention, albeit with rhetorical distancing.
The political timing mattered, too. Pakistan was preparing for the IMF board to consider the second review of the $7 billion bailout and the first review of a $1.4 billion climate facility. Demonstrating competence in food security—especially after floods—was essential. The government wanted wheat stocks rebuilt. The IMF wanted macro-stability preserved. Both sides needed a compromise.
Thus, procurement resumed—but with an economic philosophy caught between the past and future. The IMF’s staff had recently praised Pakistan for reducing interventions in commodity markets, arguing this would foster a “productive, diversified, and internationally competitive agricultural sector.” Yet the very crisis of the 2025 floods proved that even well-intentioned reforms can be undone by climate volatility and political appetite.
There was also the matter of optics. Allowing procurement at Rs3,500 meant tacitly acknowledging that a pure market approach had produced price collapses that farmers resented and politicians could not tolerate. The new procurement rate was lower than the Rs3,900 of 2023 but far higher than the market crash of Rs2,200 in the year the ban took effect. It was, in other words, a return to familiar ground—just with less grandeur.
The financial implications were staggering. Procuring 6.2 million tonnes at the indicative rate would require Rs542 billion. Even if interest rates and borrowing practices had changed since 2023, the basic structure—banks lending huge sums so governments can store grain they may not need—remained intact.
Yet the IMF acquiesced. The floods had shifted the conversation. Pakistan’s need for a “strategic reserve” was suddenly more plausible. And the government was given discretion to define what that reserve should be.
But if the shift in 2025 revealed anything, it was that Pakistan’s wheat economy cannot be governed by switches flipped on and off every few months. The state’s reliance on wheat as a political tool is too entrenched; the farmers’ dependence on it as a guaranteed income stream is too pervasive; and the IMF’s aspirations for market purity remain vulnerable to climate shocks.
And yet, amid this reversal, something else was happening—something calmer, more measured, and more sustainable than procurement politics: the seed supply chain was quietly, efficiently, and almost proudly doing its job.
III. Seeds, Sowing, and the Case for a Smaller State in Wheat
While wheat procurement was making headlines, the real story of Pakistan’s 2025 Rabi season was unfolding not in cabinet meetings but across the fields themselves. In November, the Ministry of National Food Security and Research announced that all provinces had received the seed allocations they needed—an achievement that was both logistical and symbolic.
A total of 168,000 tonnes of seed from private suppliers and 196,000 tonnes from the Punjab Seed Corporation had been distributed. These allocations were precise and proportional:
- 23,000 tonnes to Balochistan
- 82,000 tonnes to Sindh
- 22,000 tonnes to Khyber Pakhtunkhwa
- 41,000 tonnes retained in Punjab
Convoys transporting the seed were tracked daily, check-posts monitored the routes, and the Federal Seed Certification agency validated the movement reports. There were even legal challenges—petitions from certain seed companies contesting movement SOPs—but the federal government committed to defending the policy in court.
None of this resembled the chaos of procurement season. It resembled something better: a state performing a narrow, essential function and performing it well.
The sowing progress reflected this clarity.
Punjab reported rapid sowing momentum, buoyed by the recession of floodwater that made land accessible earlier than usual. Against a target of 16.5 million acres, the province had already cultivated 12.5 million acres, with expectations of hitting the target within two weeks. Farmers—typically wary of government announcements—responded positively to both the availability of certified seed and the indicative wheat price of Rs3,500 per 40kg, which provided context without coercion.
Special trends emerged: early sowing, improved access to land, and a striking 100% improvement in certified seed usage, thanks to subsidies through the Punjab Seed Corporation (Rs500 per bag) and collaborations with private companies (Rs550 per bag, or Rs5,500 per certified seed bag).
Sindh, meanwhile, had sown 533,000 hectares, hitting its peak sowing window and expecting to complete 85% of its target by month’s end. KP had sown 461,000 hectares, reaching 59% of its target, despite slower progress in sugarcane and rice-dominated areas—delays that were expected to ease as temperatures held stable and sowing extended to mid-December.
Balochistan, with its mix of tube-well irrigated zones and canal-fed districts, had sown 85,000 hectares against a target of 643,000 hectares, with the canal-dependent Nasirabad division expected to accelerate soon.
Taken together, these details sketch a picture very different from the procurement narrative. Here, the government was not setting prices, borrowing unsustainable sums, or stockpiling grain. It was simply ensuring that farmers had access to inputs, knowledge of sowing timelines, and certainty that certified seeds would reach them in time.
This is not just a more efficient role—it is a more rational one. Seed distribution, movement tracking, certification enforcement, and ensuring that private and public seed suppliers meet demand: these are tasks the state can handle without distorting incentives or creating monumental fiscal burdens.
Contrast this with procurement. Every year, the support price inflates costs, warps cropping choices, encourages overproduction in some regions and underproduction in others, and perpetuates a cycle of political dependency. Meanwhile, seed provision encourages better yields, encourages farmers to plan without waiting for government announcements, and supports a more competitive agricultural environment.
A seed-focused state is nimble. A procurement-heavy state is bloated.
As Pakistan enters another wheat season with a hybrid of old and new policies—indicative prices blended with seed-focused governance—it faces a forked path. The floods of 2025 revealed climate vulnerability, yes, but they did not justify a full return to the old support price paradigm. If anything, climate uncertainty underscores why state-driven procurement is financially dangerous: extreme weather can elevate procurement costs just as it depresses harvest volumes.
The seed system, by contrast, can adapt. More certified seeds improve resilience. Earlier sowing protects against climate volatility. Better movement monitoring ensures that inputs reach where they are needed most.
That is the path Pakistan should emphasise. Not a confused half-return to the support price era, but a decisive shift toward an agricultural future where the government’s role is limited, specialised, and supportive rather than interventive.
Epilogue: Wheat Without Handlers
In the grand cycle of Pakistan’s wheat politics—announce, borrow, procure, store, regret—there is always a temptation to believe that intervention is the only language the state can speak. But in 2025, as seeds travel across provinces, as sowing accelerates, and as the government cautiously tries to define “strategic reserves” in a calmer, less theatrical way, another possibility emerges.
What if the best governance is the governance that stays out of the field?
What if the most meaningful agricultural reform is not the support price or the procurement target, but the seed convoy monitored quietly at dawn, the certified seed tested before reaching a warehouse, the farmer sowing early because the floodwater receded and the seeds arrived right on time?
What if Pakistan finally lets wheat be wheat?
The story of the last year—of bans and reversals, floods and recalibrations—suggests that the crop might just grow better when the government is present only where it is needed, and absent everywhere else.
