The Price of a Roti

On Monday, the Karachi commissioner performed the state’s oldest food security ritual. He notified new prices for bread. A hundred-gram chapati will officially cost Rs16, up from Rs14. Naans are fixed at Rs21, Rs25 and Rs30, according to weight, up from Rs18, Rs21 and Rs27 in February. The notification acknowledged, in its own quiet way, what every household already knows: the actual tandoor charges Rs20 for the chapati and Rs30 to Rs35 for the naan, displays no official list, and keeps no weighing scale. The state has priced the roti. It just has not priced the wheat.

One notification cannot carry the whole of Pakistan’s food security problem, but it diagrams it. We govern the last hundred grams of the chain and abandon the first. Food security is decided at the sowing counter in October, not at the tandoor in April, and Pakistan keeps showing up to the wrong counter.

It is worth pausing on who stands at the right one. Two hundred and fifty million people eat because a few million farmers, most of them working fewer than five acres, most of them on their own land with their own family’s labour, put seed in the ground each autumn without any promise of what it will earn. Wheat supplies close to half the country’s calories, and Pakistan consumes 124 kilograms of it per person, among the highest rates on earth. Last season the farmer produced about 29.6 million tonnes against national consumption of 31.9. No ministry produced that harvest. No committee planted it. It came from men who borrowed at the rates the arhti quoted, absorbed the prices the market dictated, and sowed anyway. Whatever else Pakistan debates about agriculture, this should be said plainly, because it rarely is: the farmer has done his part. Every year, against every incentive, he has done his part.

Now consider what the state charges him for doing it. The official answer is that fertiliser is exempt from sales tax, and farmers fought hard in June to keep that exemption when the budget threatened it. But exempt is not untaxed. Every bag carries a five percent federal excise duty, imposed in 2023 and passed on to the buyer. DAP, the phosphate that establishes the wheat root system before winter, pays the same excise plus an additional five percent sales tax, and two-thirds of it is imported, clearing the port under customs and withholding levies before it reaches a dealer. Add it honestly and nearly a tenth of the Rs18,000 DAP bag is tax. On an illustrative cultivation plan, two bags of DAP and two of urea to the acre, plus fifteen to twenty litres of diesel for land preparation carrying a hundred rupees of levies in every litre, a farmer on a full fertiliser programme sends on the order of Rs5,000 to 6,000 an acre to the exchequer before the crop exists.

The diesel deserves one moment more. The agricultural census counts close to a million tractors and more than half a million diesel tubewells still running even after the solar migration, and every litre they burn carries about Rs78 of levy this autumn. What the total comes to, nobody knows, because the farmer buys his diesel at the same pump as the trucker and it vanishes into somebody else’s column. The state has never counted what he pays. It has been content simply to collect it. He is not a supplicant of the state. He is one of its most reliable revenue sources.

And still he is the one left guessing. His costs this season run near Rs50,000 an acre. His crop sold in April at Rs2,900 to Rs3,200 against the state’s own benchmark of Rs3,500, because the buyer the state promised had not been built. His phosphate purchases in September ran a third below last year, and reduced phosphate application risks depressing yields and raising food costs further down the line. The roti of 2027 is being made dearer at the fertiliser counter of 2026.

Meanwhile the mouths multiply. We add more than four million people a year, which means over half a million additional tonnes of wheat must be found annually just to keep every new citizen’s share unchanged. The American agriculture department’s April assessment already puts the current year’s import requirement at 1.4 million tonnes. A country adding a city every year cannot afford a sowing season governed by rumour.

None of this pits the farmer against the consumer. Flour inflation above thirty percent is a genuine emergency, and the daily-wage household that buys bread rather than wheat deserves every release the state can manage. But the household and the farmer are exposed to the same failure at opposite ends of the year. He sells into a glut in April, without a buyer; she buys into scarcity in October, without relief. Between them stands a state that has repeatedly tried to protect the consumer by managing the price of the final product while neglecting the production system that supplies it. Hence the rituals: the notified naan prices the tandoors ignore, the summoned millers and the six-rupee trim, the subsidised releases, the foreign grain contracted at 349 dollars a tonne. Every intervention lands on the chain’s final links, because that is where the politically visible consumer stands. The first link gets a council’s first meeting and a promise of shortly.

The remedy follows the diagnosis. Announce the wheat price before the sowing window closes, with its buyer and its financing named. Give the farmer seasonal credit that survives his loan date, so he is not forced to sell into the glut that later becomes the consumer’s scarcity. Publish the tax content of every input bag, so he can see what the state takes before it decides what it will give; a government serious about food security would discover that cutting the levies on phosphate is cheaper than the wheat imports that nutrient imbalance invites. And honour the accounting: the man who feeds the country, and funds its levies, is owed a price, not a promise.

The commissioner will notify again, and the naan will rise again, officially and otherwise, and the ritual will repeat with the same sincerity and the same result. Or the state could show up, for once, where food security is actually decided, and find there the man who has been feeding 250 million people on credit, his own. He has never missed a sowing. The state has never made one. Pakistan keeps showing up to the wrong counter.