While the government celebrates its ambitious five-year Transformation Plan: The URAAN Pakistan, (2024-2029), the business community is left wondering how this will be achieved given the current economic environment.

The initiative structured around five core pillars: Exports, E-Pakistan, Environment, Energy & Infrastructure, and Equity, Ethics & Empowerment (5Es), has no implementation strategy.

All eyes are now on what new measures the government intends to introduce to liberate the industrial community from the recurring cycle of weak policy enforcement, which continues to hinder industrial growth, investment, and export expansion.

The document, which sets its sights on seeing Pakistan “among the ten largest economies of the world by 2047” alongside a target of USD 50 billion in exports over the next four years (though some pages of the document suggest USD 60 billion), is unlikely to lead to any policy shift.

Such policy frameworks have been introduced repeatedly in the past — with little or no real impact.

Meanwhile, the textile industry, the country’s leading export sector, continues to be suffocated by unrealistic tax regimes, the removal of zero-rating on local inputs for export manufacturing, exorbitant energy prices, regressive policies on captive power plants, and declining cotton production.

Team URAAN must recalibrate its approach by reversing these policies and redirecting its efforts toward addressing the real issues.

Textile exports remain the first line of defense:

Pakistan’s import dependency is precarious. Initially concentrated on petroleum products and machinery, imports have expanded to cover a broad range of food commodities, including palm oil, tea, and pulses, driving up the import bill. Alarmingly, this trend is now extending to the textile sector. The rising import of raw cotton is particularly concerning, surging to USD 1.7 billion in FY 2023 and already reaching USD 706 million in the first four months of FY 2025, a more than 50 percent increase from the same period of last year.

Once self-sufficient in cotton, Pakistan has now become a major net importer; in fact, the largest importer of US cotton; a shift driven by successive crop failures.

With that, production costs for key crops, including cotton, have doubled since 2023, further increasing the sector’s reliance on imports.

The country’s export mix is rapidly deteriorating. Apart from IT and agricultural exports -which remain opportunistic and unreliable - textile exports are the only glimmer of hope for Pakistan’s balance of payments........

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