Ask what causes Pakistan’s food insecurity and the instinctive answer is scarcity: not enough land, not enough water, not enough grain. The instinct is wrong, and the contrast with the Gulf makes that clear. Every Gulf state that solved its food security problem started from almost nothing: minimal arable land, near-zero fresh water, and import dependence above 80 percent. Pakistan has the Indus basin, one of the largest irrigation systems on earth, and farmland the desert economies of the Gulf never had. In most staples, it is already a net food producer. Yet millions of Pakistanis remain in crisis-level food insecurity or worse, a situation formally flagged since 2019, while three desert economies with a fraction of Pakistan’s natural advantages have moved through an arc the Gulf itself describes simply: importers became producers, and producers became exporters.
That is not a story about geography. It is a story about what happens after the harvest.
Qatar moved fastest. Facing a sudden disruption to its food supply in 2017, it reached 30 percent self-sufficiency in dairy within six months and full self-sufficiency by 2019, eventually exporting to neighboring markets. It took two years, backed by sovereign capital that could move immediately and at scale. Pakistan cannot match that speed, and does not need to. Its problem was never a shortage of dairy cows.
Saudi Arabia’s path is more instructive. Importing roughly 80 percent of its food, Riyadh spent about seven years under Vision 2030 building toward self-sufficiency in dairy, eggs and dates through sustained, unglamorous investment, including interest-free loans and subsidized inputs, until the numbers moved. It now produces dairy at 109 percent of demand and eggs at well over 100 percent, with surplus reaching export markets and agricultural GDP hitting a record $30 billion in 2024.
The UAE had the hardest starting position of the three: just 1 percent arable land, over 90 percent import dependency and six million new residents in a decade. Rather than wait for land and water to cooperate, it moved on what it could control: A Food Security Office inside the prime minister’s office, a database tracking 18 food categories, and, in Abu Dhabi, a 3.3 square kilometer food trading and logistics hub beside major ports. None of the three could shortcut geography. All of them shortcut administration.
That is not a story about geography. It is a story about what happens after the harvest.
Mehreen Durrani
Pakistan’s problem sits in exactly the gap the Gulf had to build institutions to cross, except that Pakistan never had geography to overcome. Follow its food from field to plate and production is the strongest link in the chain. Every stage after it gets weaker. Roughly 60 percent of the country’s wheat is still stored on farms in jute bags and mud bins, exposed to pests and moisture. National storage capacity runs 300,000 to 500,000 tons short of what a single wheat harvest requires. Post-harvest losses for perishable crops reach 20 to 40 percent, costing more than $1.3 billion a year. One of Pakistan’s own industry bodies has called this an institutional failure, not a technological one. And because farmers often cannot afford to hold their crop, many are forced into distress sales right after harvest, at the lowest prices of the year.
Logistics compounds the problem. The basic infrastructure the Gulf built entire strategies around has moved backward here: Pakistan fell from 68th to 122nd on the World Bank’s Logistics Performance Index, then dropped out of the ranking altogether by 2023. Fragmented wholesale markets add a final layer of loss before food reaches a household. None of this shows up as a shortage in national production statistics. It shows up as food that exists somewhere but does not reach the people who need it.
Underneath all of it sits the deepest problem, and the cheapest to fix. Pakistan’s own household survey, the PSLM/HIES, already asks families, in the same questionnaire and the same year, about both food insecurity and school attendance. No official analysis crossing the two appears to have been published, so the government cannot see which districts are living through both crises at once, or where a storage investment or a targeted safety net would help most. This is not a resource problem. It is a query that has never been run, on data that has existed since 2019.
There is proof that joining the two works. A World Food Programme-backed school meals pilot in Balochistan, treating hunger and school attendance as one problem, produced a 45 percent rise in enrollment and a meaningful gain in attendance within a single year. The government’s Uraan Pakistan framework already contains the relevant pillars, with food and water under Environment, and education and health under Equity, Ethics and Empowerment. The government’s plan for the coming fiscal year states the ambition to integrate them almost word for word.
The Gulf states turned import dependency into export capacity by compensating, through institutions and capital, for geography they could never change. Pakistan does not need to compensate for geography. It has the land, the water and the harvest.
What is missing is not vision, and it is not food. It is an office with the kind of mandate the UAE gave its Food Security Office: the authority to see food security and its downstream effects, from storage to school attendance, as one connected picture rather than several separate files. Pakistan’s version would not need to sit inside the prime minister’s office to work. It would need only the mandate to join what the country already measures.
-Mehreen Durrani is a strategy and transformation independent professional operating at the intersection of policy and technology, driving digital transformation and strategic partnerships to deliver institutional and economic impact.
