The Federal Committee on Agriculture met in Islamabad this month and confirmed what the fields had already announced. Cotton production in 2026-27 is estimated at 6.71 million bales against a target of 9.64 million. A shortfall of 30 per cent, in a season the ministry itself has not blamed on the weather. It is the sixth consecutive miss. Over the last five years, the state has promised between roughly 10 and 13 million bales and delivered between five and eight and a half. Each spring a target, each autumn an apology, each winter a seminar. The ritual is now so familiar that the ginners have stopped pretending to believe it. They call these drawing-room estimates, and they are right.

The more honest number of this season is not production. It is acreage. Cotton area fell 12.6 per cent in a single year, from 4.97 million acres to 4.35 million, that is over 600,000 acres. In Punjab the fall was 16.4 per cent. This was not a decision taken by the Ministry of National Food Security. It was taken by a few hundred thousand farmers, each alone at the sowing window, each doing arithmetic the state refuses to do. There is a revealing twist. Cotton yield per acre actually improved by nearly nine per cent this season, according to preliminary reports, yet total production fell because farmers planted substantially less of it. The immediate crisis is not simply that farmers cannot grow enough cotton. It is that they increasingly choose not to. Look at where the land went. Sugarcane area expanded 11.2 per cent, maize 11.5 per cent and rice 3.9 per cent. Farmers are not abandoning agriculture. They are abandoning cotton, and they are doing it for reasons that would be taught in any introductory economics class.

The economics are stark. In a comparison of Punjab's 2022-23 crops, the government's Agriculture Policy Institute estimated net income of about Rs64,000 per acre from cotton, against Rs42,000 from sugarcane. Cotton could compete. But a more recent assessment by Fauji Fertilizer put the provisional 2025-26 net income at barely Rs5,000 an acre........

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