Punjab’s wheat harvest is laying bare a policy transition that may have made fiscal sense on paper, but has been badly handled in practice. The state has pulled back from direct procurement faster than the private sector has built the capacity to take its place. The result is now plain at the farm gate: small farmers are being pushed to sell under pressure, below the government’s own benchmark, because the system meant to buy their crop is still not fully ready.

Take a small farmer in Sahiwal. His cost of production per acre — seed, fertiliser, tubewell hours, harvester hire — is now around Rs50,000. His wheat has been harvested. The bags are stacked and ready. His loan falls due this week. If he cannot repay on time, he not only faces higher financing costs, but also risks losing access to credit for the next crop. He cannot afford to wait for the market to sort itself out. He has to sell now, to whoever shows up, at whatever price is on offer.

And that price, in many parts of Punjab this April, is between Rs2,900 and Rs3,200 per 40 kilograms. The official benchmark is Rs3,500. For millions of producers, that gap is not just a number. It is a direct loss, pushed onto the part of the value chain least able to absorb it.

Punjab produces more than three-quarters of Pakistan’s wheat, around 24 million metric tonnes in an average year. For years, harvest season came with a basic assumption: the state would provide at least some degree of price and procurement certainty. That system was expensive and far from perfect, but it gave farmers something to plan around. The current transition has taken away........

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