The Wax Scientists of Islamabad: Why Pakistan Forgot How to Grow Its Own Food

There was a time, not so long ago, when Pakistan fed its own people pulses grown in its own soil, and had enough left over to sell to the world. Before 1998, this country was a self-sufficient producer and a regular exporter of gram, lentils, mung, and mash — crops that nourished us without asking anything of foreign exchange. Today we import between 1.3 and 1.5 million tonnes of pulses every year, spending close to a billion dollars we do not have, buying back from Australia and Canada what our own farmers once grew better. That transformation — from exporter to beggar, in a single generation — is not a tragedy of nature. It is a tragedy of governance, and I have spent the last decade watching it unfold from a strange vantage point: my own front garden.

I am an engineer by training, but a farmer by birth. I live in Bahria Enclave, Islamabad, barely two kilometres from the National Agricultural Research Centre — NARC — a facility partly built with American assistance, sitting in what is genuinely one of the most beautiful stretches of land in this country. For ten years, I have walked past its gates, sat in its seminar rooms, and argued with its scientists. And in ten years, I have arrived at one honest, uncomfortable conclusion: the ordinary gardener outside NARC’s walls, and the illiterate farmer tilling a few acres in Chakwal, Tado Adam (Sindh) or Multan, often understands water, soil, and season better than the men and women inside who can recite a plant’s Latin binomial without blinking. Botanical nomenclature is not wisdom. It is vocabulary. And Pakistan has confused the two for far too long.

Ask any agricultural scientist in this country why our fields are failing, and you will hear the same rehearsed answer within minutes: water scarcity, climate change, and — increasingly — vague accusations against Islamabad-based NGOs supposedly conspiring against food security. It is a convenient script. It requires no accountability, no institutional reform, and no admission that the failure sits closer to home than any foreign hand. So let us test the excuse against the facts, because facts are patient things, and they do not care whose reputation they damage.

Agriculture consumes 90 to 95 % of Pakistan’s freshwater — among the highest sectoral shares anywhere. That much of the complaint is true. But scarcity is not destiny; efficiency is a choice, and here the comparison becomes unbearable. Egypt, working with a fraction of our rainfall and almost none of our river endowment, has pushed nearly all its cultivated land onto structured, controlled irrigation and achieved crop-water productivity rivalling European farms. Across the border, Indian Punjab, Rajasthan, and Gujarat — sharing our same semi-arid geography, drawing from the same over-stressed aquifers — have spent two decades scaling drip and sprinkler irrigation under coordinated national schemes, lining canals to stop seepage, and slowly nudging farmers away from thirsty crops. Pakistani Punjab and Sindh, by contrast, still flood-irrigate the majority of our fields through unlined earthen watercourses, losing enormous volumes of water to seepage and evaporation before it ever reaches a root. Our wheat yields trail India’s by over 35 % not because our sun is weaker or our soil poorer, but because we still plant uncertified, farm-saved seed on nearly two-thirds of our wheat area while research budgets stay thin and fragmented.

So no — the crisis is not water. The crisis is what we have done, and failed to do, with the water we have.

And this is where I must speak plainly about the institutions themselves, because politeness has achieved nothing in ten years of trying. Pakistan has no shortage of agricultural bureaucracy. We have NARC. We have PARC. We have the Ayub Agricultural Research Institute in Faisalabad, once among the finest in Asia. We have agriculture universities scattered across every province. On paper, our National Water Policy is comprehensive, thoughtful, even elegant. And yet none of it moves the needle for the farmer standing ankle-deep in flood-irrigated mud, because the people meant to serve him has become something closer to exhibits than experts. Once I visited Madame Tussauds Museum, the famous wax museum founded in London in 1835. Its wax figures earn their keep — tourists pay to see them, and the museum survives on the revenue their stillness generates. Our agricultural institutions have inverted that logic entirely. The wax figures sitting in air-conditioned offices in Islamabad and Faisalabad draw handsome salaries, perks, and privileges, while producing, in return, silence — no field trials that reach the farmer, no seed replacement programme that moves faster than the crisis, no honest audit of why a country blessed with the Indus Basin cannot feed itself in pulses.

The remedy is not mysterious, and it does not require another five-year plan or another donor-funded workshop. It requires merit. Appointments in NARC, PARC, and our agricultural universities must be won on demonstrated field results, not seniority, connections, or political patronage. And it requires movement — physically. No agricultural scientist drawing a government salary should be permitted to spend a career behind a desk in an air-conditioned office while the watercourse outside Multan silently swallows a third of the water meant for the crop. Send them into the fields they are paid to study. Let them stand where the gardener outside my gate stands, and learn, as I have, that his hands often know more than their journals.

Pakistan did not run out of water. It ran out of the will to use the water it has honestly, efficiently, and without excuse. Before we ask the world for climate reparations, we owe our own farmers an apology — and a government willing, finally, to work as hard as they do.

A brief suggestion for the Prime Minister of Pakistan: I recently watched our Minister for Food Security defend sugar exports with the same tired excuses, even as the Prime Minister’s own government leans on China — sending our scientists there for training, only to watch them return and resume their posts as wax figures behind desks. So here is my humble suggestion, Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif: lease a few AI robots from China instead. I will upload, free of cost, a food-security programme for them to run. Five years, no ministry, no secretariat, no brigade — no salaries, and certainly no corruption, and Pakistan will be self-sufficient in food.