When you drive through South Punjab, you will notice irregular plots with diverse land uses and different crops growing on them. The yields on those crops, you will discover if so inclined, can also vary. This heterogenous landscape with many different crops reflects diverse management choices, capabilities, needs and resources. Many of these plots are managed by smallholder farmers who operate land as small as half a hectare.

On a sunny October afternoon in 2020, I walked with Nusrat*, her elderly mother and younger sister through their small plot of land where they grow cotton. She spoke about her attachment to this land. “My family has belonged to this area since the time of Hazrat Adam [Prophet Adam],” Nusrat claims, “we belong to this land.”

I certainly did not question the validity of her statement. However, maintaining a dignified life and livelihood on the land to which they are so attached increasingly came with a great deal of hardships.

After generations of patrimonial division of the land, her family barely had enough land to cultivate crops on. They lived off a rented agricultural plot of roughly four acres, where they grew cotton in the summer and wheat in winter. Cotton had become unproductive over recent years and the crops were evidently in a poor condition, with a great deal of shed leaves and unopened spotted bolls, indicating disease and damage.

The miracle seed that once transformed Pakistan’s cotton fields ultimately proved unable to withstand evolving pests, climate extremes and failing institutions, resulting in the unravelling of an entire agricultural system. Based on years of fieldwork, this is the story of how South Punjab’s cotton belt entered a crisis and why the poorest farmers remain trapped within it

The miracle seed that once transformed Pakistan’s cotton fields ultimately proved unable to withstand evolving pests, climate extremes and failing institutions, resulting in the unravelling of an entire agricultural system. Based on years of fieldwork, this is the story of how South Punjab’s cotton belt entered a crisis and why the poorest farmers remain trapped within it

With a yield of only 1.5 maund per acre (one maund is equal to 40 kilogrammes) and little hope for more, Nusrat conveyed a sense of apprehension: “When my father comes in the evening and visits the farm, he is unable to eat afterwards.”

They managed to survive by working as weed pickers, but that did not pay well. When asked why they did not grow something else, she said, “Only the poor are forced to grow cotton. Big landowners are not. They grow rice, potato and maize. They grow fodder. They have the machinery to mix residues in the land. That increases the average of the next crop.”

She was not an outlier. In many parts of South Punjab, referring to the belt of 11 districts that grows close to two-thirds of Pakistan’s cotton, farmers have increasingly referred to the crop in the language of a funeral, as “vanishing” and “disappearing”. The official record agrees: the land planted with cotton in many parts of the so-called ‘cotton belt’ has shrunk steadily for over a decade.

This is the story of how that happened.

It involves hopes centred around a seed technology that delivered on its promises of yield protection for a few good years before succumbing to complex social-ecological challenges, and ultimately failing to preserve a long-standing cotton industry in the region. It is also the story of who gets to leave a failing agricultural system and who is left holding it in place.

A CROP OLDER THAN THE COUNTRY

Cotton is not new to this region. Traces of the significance of agriculture in Punjab can be found as far back as the sixth millennium BCE, when the earliest known specimens of cotton fibres were found from the Indus Valley civilisation.

The cotton industry is also well-established in the region. Cotton was promoted in Punjab during British colonial rule through the establishment of an Agriculture College in Lyallpur (today’s Faisalabad) in 1902. By 1914, American commercial varieties of cotton were introduced, due to their higher yields and better lint quality, changing the cotton landscape in perpetuity.

The cultivation of cotton spread rapidly during the 19th and 20th century as the canal system was established, with the area under cotton acreage increasing since the creation of Pakistan in the mid-20th century.

Agricultural production in South Punjab is subject to great ecological challenges. Summers are scorching, rain is scarce and falls mostly in the monsoon months, and agriculture survives on irrigation. Roughly 35 million people live in South Punjab, three-quarters of them in the........

© Dawn (Magazines)