On August 19, 2026, Pakistan's Economic Coordination Committee sat in Islamabad and approved something so absurd it could only make sense in a country that has stopped keeping track of its own contradictions: the export of 108,000 metric tonnes of sugar. Not new sugar. Not surplus grown this season. This was sugar Pakistan had itself imported only a year earlier, part of a 300,000-tonne shipment brought in when the country ran short, now being sold back onto the international market because global prices had improved and a state trading corporation was sitting on unsold stock. A nation imports sugar, cannot manage its own reserve properly, and then exports the same sugar again. If satire wrote government policy, it would struggle to invent something this precise.

But strip away the comedy and what remains is a chilling arithmetic. Sugarcane, over its long growing cycle, drinks over 2000 millimetres of water. Cotton needs roughly a third of that 500 to 800 millimetres. Wheat, the crop that feeds the nation's bread, needs barely 350 to 450 millimetres. When Pakistan sends sugar abroad, it is not selling a commodity. It is liquidating the one resource it can least afford to lose, from a river system that is already under siege. The Indus Waters Treaty, the arrangement that has governed the basin's waters since 1960 has been under direct threat from New Delhi, whose government has signalled its intent to restrict the flow of water into Pakistan whenever leverage is useful. A country staring down that threat should be hoarding every drop the Indus carries. Instead, it is exporting it in crystallised form, one tonne of sugar at a time, to earn foreign exchange it could have earned more sensibly elsewhere.

The cruelty of the timing is what makes this moment worth dwelling on. In the very same weeks that the government cleared sugar for export, it also approved the emergency import of one million metric tonnes of wheat through the state-run Trading Corporation of Pakistan, after flour prices climbed by more than 70 percent year-on-year and provinces demanded over 2.2 million tonnes to head off a crisis at the roti counter. Punjab, Sindh, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Balochistan all came to Islamabad with the same message: the country........

© The Friday Times