PREVENTABLE crises strike the hardest because they come with fair warning.

Pakistan’s looming water emergency is one of them, long predicted, widely discussed and yet perilously neglected. The new World Bank report on global water conservation has delivered what should be a clarion call for policymakers. Pakistan ranks among just six countries where inefficient agricultural water use now collides with intensifying aridity. Across the world, some 324 billion cubic metres of freshwater are lost every year, enough to meet the needs of 280 million people. Yet most of this loss is not the work of nature; it is the consequence of our own choices, of policies that prize short-term yields over long-term survival, of agricultural practices designed for another century and of a national mindset that still treats water as infinite.

Nowhere is that contradiction more visible than in Pakistan’s fields. Agriculture consumes more than 90 percent of the country’s freshwater, one of the highest proportions anywhere on Earth. Yet the return on this massive withdrawal is dismal; every cubic metre of water adds barely a dollar and a half to the economy, compared to eight dollars in China and more than twenty in the United States. The arithmetic of survival simply does not add up. The more we draw, the less we gain—a paradox that points to an economy structurally at........

© Pakistan Observer