Pakistan publishes its agriculture census, revealing the federation beneath our fields

The state’s desire to count is never entirely innocent. British India turned censuses, land records and irrigation maps into technologies of rule: enumeration made people and property legible, while the canal colonies linked land settlement, water allocation and revenue to a powerful bureaucracy. Pakistan inherited that administrative apparatus. Yet the same numbers that can help a state extract can also help citizens see what is changing and demand a response.The Agricultural Census 2024 deserves to be read in that critical but constructive spirit. It is Pakistan’s seventh agricultural census and the first to combine agriculture, livestock and farm machinery in one digital exercise.

This 2024 census is the first to combine agriculture, livestock and farm machinery in one digital exercise

This 2024 census is the first to combine agriculture, livestock and farm machinery in one digital exercise

Fieldwork was carried out in two phases between September 2024 and February 2025. It was sample-based rather than a literal count of every farm. (This was a different approach from work done before 2010 and from that of methods used by many countries, and therefore, its results merit more scrutiny). Selected mouzas and urban blocks were surveyed, while exceptionally large land holdings were included with certainty. Tablets, GIS mapping and real-time monitoring were used to produce district-level estimates. The numbers are therefore not sacred, but they are the most systematic national picture available.

More farms, smaller farms, and arguably lesser productivity

The most alarming finding is the continued fragmentation of land. Pakistan had 8.26 million farms in 2010; it now has 11.1 million, an increase of 34 per cent. Farm area grew by only 12 per cent, so average farm size fell from 6.4 to 5.3 acres. More strikingly, the number of fragmented farms rose from 2.83 million to 4.98 million, while the average number of separate pieces within a fragmented holding increased from three to seven.

Fragmentation is not a neutral statistic. Scattered parcels raise the time and cost of ploughing, irrigating and guarding a holding; they shrink the returns to levelling land, laying watercourses or investing in a tubewell that would pay off on a single consolidated field; they multiply boundary disputes between neighbours; and they push machinery, which needs scale to be worth renting or owning, further out of reach for smallholders. A farm split into seven pieces is not simply smaller. It is harder to farm well.

Inheritance is central to this story. After each generation, land titles are divided among heirs and the operational holding is often divided with them. Women are still frequently denied their lawful shares, so Pakistan manages to combine fragmentation with gender injustice. The answer cannot be to weaken inheritance rights. It is to separate ownership from operation.

Families should be able to retain distinct legal titles and income shares while cultivating adjoining parcels as one unit. Producer cooperatives, family farm companies, machinery pools, digital lease markets and voluntary land exchanges can create scale without dispossession. Government can provide cadastral maps, low-cost lease registration, model contracts and quick dispute resolution. Women heirs must be recorded as members, paid directly and given enforceable exit rights. Pakistan does not necessarily need fewer owners; it........

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