Pakistan’s cotton sector — once the backbone of its agricultural and industrial might — now teeters on the edge of irreversible decline. Despite its enduring strategic value, the crop has been undermined by outdated practices, policy distortions, and ecological upheavals. A constellation of challenges — from manual harvesting to failing seed technology and land fragmentation — has gradually hollowed out the industry, while the unchecked rise of sugarcane cultivation in key cotton-growing zones has accelerated its demise.
The latest statistical dispatch from the Pakistan Cotton Ginners Association (PCGA) casts a somber silhouette over the state of the nation’s cotton sector — a once-proud pillar now withering in sustained retreat. As of mid-July, ginning units across the country had received a meager 297,751 bales of raw cotton — a staggering descent from last year’s 442,041 bales during the same window, registering a precipitous contraction of nearly 32 percent.
But the present nadir rests atop a still-deeper abyss. The 2024 count had itself marked a cataclysmic 48.48 percent nosedive from 2023’s figure of 858,007 bales. Aggregated across this biennium, Pakistan’s raw cotton output has hemorrhaged by an unrelenting 65 percent — a calamitous freefall for a commodity long regarded as the lifeblood of the country’s agrarian and industrial continuum. Cotton, after all, is no peripheral player — it undergirds the nation’s textile empire, anchors export revenues, and sustains the livelihoods of millions spread across the cultivation-to-manufacture chain.
A forensic perusal of the PCGA data reveals provincial asymmetries. While Punjab managed a flicker of resurgence — logging a 27 percent uptick in arrivals — the southern belt bore the brunt of the devastation. Sindh and Balochistan, both once-thriving cotton bastions, witnessed erosions of 53 percent and 54 percent respectively in raw cotton flow. Even Punjab’s modest gains are clouded by intra-provincial inconsistencies, with certain districts floundering in droughts of yield.
No vignette illustrates this systemic unravelling more graphically than that of Rahim Yar Khan. A district that once boasted cotton of unparalleled quality has, over two decades, capitulated to sugarcane’s sugary seduction. With six colossal sugar mills entrenched in its soil, the region has increasingly rerouted its agronomic energies to serve the sugar lobby’s voracious appetites.
Cotton has been quietly ousted — not by natural attrition but by orchestrated incentivization. Policymaking, under the thumb of influential sugar syndicates, has turned sugarcane farming into a goldmine, leaving cotton an abandoned relic. Unsurprisingly, cotton arrivals in Rahim Yar Khan have collapsed by over 99 percent compared to the same juncture last year — an almost total obliteration.
Yet, the malaise afflicting cotton transcends the sugarcane shadow. This botanical decline is a symptom of deeper, more systemic malaise — a confluence of structural neglect, policy myopia, and infrastructural decay. Cotton’s roots may run deep in Pakistani soil, but they are now entangled in a web of adversities that no longer allow it to thrive.
At the heart of cotton’s dwindling fortunes lies a clutch of entrenched structural handicaps — chief among them, the dogged dependence on manual labour in harvesting. The dearth of mechanisation has rendered cotton-picking not only gruelingly labour-heavy but also inefficient and vulnerable to contamination, diminishing both yield and fibre integrity in the process.
Compounding the crisis is Pakistan’s overreliance on genetically modified Bt cotton seeds. Once heralded as pest-resistant marvels, these strains have over time grown increasingly impotent against evolving insect threats. Government initiatives aimed at diversifying seed usage have limped along, largely because financially strained small-scale farmers lack both the capital and the technical scaffolding necessary to transition to hardier, more climate-savvy seed types.
An equally pressing concern is land fragmentation. According to a recent International Labour Organisation brief, over 90 percent of the country’s cotton is cultivated on plots smaller than five hectares. These pint-sized parcels, though numerous, are inherently inefficient — stifling economies of scale, curbing the adoption of mechanised techniques, and hamstringing productivity across the board. Then there’s the growing wrath of climate change — a silent, slow-moving wrecking ball. Scorching heat spells, capricious rainfall, and depleting soil vitality have begun to leave their mark with increasing frequency and severity, turning once-fertile tracts into unyielding wastelands.
This relentless unraveling of a crop that remains vital to Pakistan’s agriculture economy and export framework demands more than cosmetic fixes — it calls for a tectonic policy overhaul. Mechanisation should no longer be aspirational but mandatory — subsidised and scaled to empower smallholders with access to cutting-edge tools. Simultaneously, the country’s agricultural R&D apparatus must be fortified to usher in an era of robust, pest-resilient, locally tailored seed genetics that can weather the vagaries of a warming planet.
But perhaps the most politically thorny — and most urgent — of reforms is the unchecked sprawl of sugarcane in traditional cotton belts. Regulatory lethargy has allowed distortive, sugarcane-favouring incentives to flourish, crowding out cotton from its ancestral domains. It is imperative that these perverse policy structures be dismantled and the agricultural compass reoriented toward crops that carry strategic, not just commercial, weight. Absent such bold recalibration, cotton’s future will remain shackled — its promise stifled beneath layers of misaligned priorities and inertia.
The unraveling of Pakistan’s cotton ecosystem is not a natural decay, but a consequence of policy inertia, technological stagnation, and climate vulnerability. If cotton is to reclaim its central role in the nation’s economic matrix, bold and immediate reforms are indispensable. Mechanisation must be democratised through smart subsidies, obsolete seed dependency must give way to innovation, and sugarcane’s encroachment must be reined in by firm regulatory resolve. Without a strategic pivot, Pakistan risks losing not just a crop — but a cornerstone of its national resilience.