From LNG to the land: A roadmap for Murree’s high-value green economy

Walk the old tracks above Tret, Dewal or Phagwari and look at the hillsides. You will see stone walls, stacked by hand, stepping down the slopes in long, patient curves. These are the terraces of Murree, and they are the most honest monument this land has. They were not built for tourists. They were built to feed families. Today many of them are collapsing, overgrown, or sold to someone who lives hundreds of kilometres away.

I write this as an appeal to the people of Murree District, from the cool ridges to the valleys of Kahuta and Kotli Sattian. For a generation we were told that the future of Murree was concrete. It was not. The future of Murree is soil, water, altitude and the knowledge our grandparents never lost.

Before 1851, the area then called Mussiarri was forest and steep hillside held by the Dhund Abbasi tribes. Farming was small and practical: maize and wheat on terraced plots, with livestock, walnuts and forest produce. Then the British founded a sanatorium and summer station here, and for a time in the 1870s Murree served as the summer seat of the Punjab government. Murree Brewery followed in 1860, near Ghora Gali. The new residents wanted the food of home, so the hills were turned toward European crops: potatoes, cabbage and turnips, and above all temperate fruit. Cherries, peaches, pears, plums, strawberries and raspberries were grown here because the plains of Punjab could not grow them. Apples took root in the upper villages, and stone terracing was encouraged to hold soil on the steep slopes. Whatever one thinks of the Raj, it understood something we have forgotten: Murree’s climate is its capital.

Our elders tell more than the records do. They remember terraced fields in the wetter valleys where rice was grown, stepped down the hillside the way it is in Vietnam, southern China and the Andes of Peru. They remember maize cobs drying on rooftops, walnut trees at every boundary, and a household economy in which a family ate what it grew and sold the surplus down the road to Rawalpindi. After 1947, the hills stayed largely agrarian for a generation. Tourism was an addition, not a replacement. A family might rent a room in summer while the fields continued underneath.

I will not invent statistics for those decades, because exact district-level production figures for 1947 to 1980 are scattered and hard to find. That is itself part of the tragedy. We stopped measuring agriculture in Murree because we stopped valuing it. The Punjab Agriculture Department and the Pakistan Agricultural Research Council should be asked a simple question: how many hectares were under crops in 1960, in 1980, and today?

From roughly the 1980s onward, the logic of the hills changed. The road improved, the middle class of Islamabad and Rawalpindi grew, and visitors multiplied. Land that produced apples and maize could suddenly fetch a far larger one-time payment as a hotel site. Politicians promised roads, plazas and “development.” The contractor became the local hero, and the farmer became an embarrassment.

Consider the arithmetic of that bargain. A family sells an orchard or terrace for a lump sum. The money goes on a house, a wedding, a vehicle, a rented shop. Within a decade it is gone, and so is the land, and so is the only asset that could have paid every year forever. The buyer, often from outside, builds, sells again, and profits at each step. The seller is left as a caretaker, a driver or a labourer on land his grandfather farmed. Meanwhile every cut for a plot or a road loosens a slope that terrace walls once held. Forests have thinned, springs have weakened, and landslides have grown more frequent and more deadly. The snow-trapped traffic of recent winters showed what overbuilding on a fragile ridge does to a town. And in most of Murree today, not one kilogram of rice is grown. Where fields once held water and green shoots, there is scrub, a boundary wall, or a signboard that reads “Plots for Sale.”

Now we must speak about leadership, and about the most powerful man this district has produced. Shahid Khaqan Abbasi belongs to Murree. He has been our face in the National Assembly for most of the last four decades. He served as Minister for Petroleum and Natural Resources from 2013 to 2017 and as Prime Minister of Pakistan from August 2017 to May 2018. Few districts in this country have ever had a son with that much access to the levers of the state. So the question is not whether Murree’s people loved him. The question is what Murree’s farmers have to show for it.

Where is the agricultural research station for our hills? Where are the cold-storage chains, the nurseries, the cooperative packing houses, the farm-to-market roads built for fruit rather than for weekend traffic? Where is the terrace-restoration programme, the rice revival, the orchard credit scheme for a young man who wants to plant cherries instead of pouring concrete? A prime minister from Murree could have made this district the fruit basket of the capital. Instead, a district that fed British soldiers has watched its own fields go to seed while its politicians chased power in Islamabad.

Murree has a stigma of Liquefied natural gas is a vast and hidden business, run through terminals, tenders, shipping contracts and ministries that ordinary people never see. Not everyone in Murree can import LNG. Not a teacher from Dewal, not a farmer from Kotli Sattian, not a young graduate from Kahuta. That door opens only for those with capital, connections and a seat near power, and it stays shut for everyone else. A politician who spent years at the centre of that world, while his own hills lost their orchards, owes his people an answer: why did the national gas economy get your attention, and the village farm economy did not?

The hope is that Murree’s future does not depend on any politician. It depends on what the land can still do, and the land can do a great deal. Altitude, rainfall, cool nights and acidic forest soils are still here, and so are the warmer valleys below. Murree District is not one climate but two: cool upper ridges, and the gentler lower belts of Kahuta and Kotli Sattian. Together they can grow what no other district in Pakistan offers in one place.

On the upper ridges, Kashmiri-type cherries suit the altitude and the winter chill. Fresh cherries sell at premium prices in Pakistani cities and the Gulf, and the season is short, which keeps the price high. Peaches, plums, pears and apples already have a history here, and the old orchard villages of Dewal, Phagwari and Sehrbhagla show what is possible. Blueberries need acidic, well-drained soil and cool conditions, which is close to a description of Murree’s pine-forest hillsides. They rank among the most profitable fruit crops per acre, and Pakistan imports nearly all it consumes. Pilot plots with agricultural universities should show within a few seasons which varieties pay best under our rainfall.

Saffron is among the most valuable spices by weight, and Pampore in Kashmir, the best-known growing region in our neighbourhood, sits at an elevation similar to parts of the Murree hills. I have seen reports that European agricultural analysts rated this region well for saffron. Test it on one field, measure it, then expand. Tea deserves the same trial, since Pakistan’s research at Shinkiari in Mansehra has shown it can grow in the northern hills, and walnuts, hazelnuts and kiwi fruit suit the cool uplands with ready markets.

In the lower, warmer valleys of Kahuta and Kotli Sattian lies the district’s boldest opportunity. Stop for a moment and think about the numbers. Top-grade agarwood, the raw material behind oud, sells for roughly $30,000 to over $100,000 per kilogram on the world market, which is about Rs8.3 million to Rs27.7 million at today’s rate. Superior and rare grades can exceed $290,000 per kilogram, or more than Rs80 million. One kilogram of the finest wood can be worth more than an entire hotel plot sold to an outsider for a one-time payment. These valleys are the best places in Murree District to grow it. Agarwood is a long game, since the resin forms over many years, so the smart path is demonstration plots on sheltered, well-drained slopes, run with agricultural universities and PARC, with results recorded each season before scaling up. These figures are for the best resin-rich wood, which takes many years to form, and plantation-grown wood usually earns less than wild, aged material. Farmers should plan on long timelines and ask researchers what yields to expect. But a family that plants today builds an inheritance for its grandchildren that no hotel plot can match.

These same valleys are the best home in the district for the Miyazaki mango. A few orchards of grafted plants, sold under a “Murree District” label to Islamabad and Gulf buyers, would show quickly what this fruit can earn per acre. Branding is half the value. A mango with a name, a story and a place on the label sells for many times the price of an anonymous box.

Can this reach $5 billion a year, roughly Rs1,500 billion? Not by Murree alone, and not overnight, and I will not insult readers by promising it. But a national ambition is worth naming. Pakistan imports large quantities of fruit, nuts, spices and perfumery materials. If the northern hills grew a serious share of what we now import, and exported premium berries, cherries, saffron, walnuts and oud, the foreign-exchange effect over a decade or two could be measured in billions. Imagine a Pakistani perfume house bottling oud grown in Kotli Sattian. Murree District can lead that story. Its strength is not volume but quality, branding and proximity to the capital.

So here is what I ask of the people of Murree. Do not sell your land. If you must sell, sell nothing you cannot replace, because land is the one asset your children cannot manufacture. Do not follow the greedy and the ambitious who tell you that your future lies in plots, plazas and contracts. Ask every candidate who comes for your vote how many nurseries he will fund, how many cold-storage units he will build, which research station will serve our hills and valleys, and which road will carry our fruit to market. If the answer is only more concrete, you are being sold the story your fathers were sold.

Organise. One orchard is a hobby, but a cooperative of two hundred families, sharing cold storage, grading, packaging and a brand, is an industry. Demand extension officers, subsidised saplings, drip irrigation and rainwater harvesting. Restore the terraces, because every rebuilt wall holds soil, recharges springs and protects the road below. And bring the young home. Our youth are told that the only options are the hotel counter, the driver’s seat or a flight abroad. They should be told they can be agronomists, nursery owners, food processors, beekeepers, packagers and guides on farm-stay trails. Ecotourism that lets visitors pick cherries, stay with a farming family and buy honest produce will outlast any hotel that sells a view and nothing else.

Murree’s leadership had every tool to protect this heritage, and the most powerful tools of all sat in the hands of its own son. It chose the quick return. It built for the weekend visitor and forgot the permanent resident, and it handed our young people congested roads, falling springs, sliding slopes and fewer real jobs than their grandparents had. That is not development. It is a slow sale of an inheritance.

But a failure of leadership is not a destiny. The terraces are still there, waiting for hands. The cold nights are still here, and the rain, and the altitude that made the British fall in love with this place. The warm valleys of Kahuta and Kotli Sattian are ready for the trees that could make this district famous again. The land has been patient. It asks only that we stop selling it and start farming it again.