Low Wheat Prices and Climate Change Break Farmers in Punjab

April is supposed to be the golden month. The skies were meant to be clear, the combine harvesters humming, and the mandis bustling with the season’s reward. But April 2026 has delivered something else entirely to the wheat growers of Punjab, a relentless procession of western disturbances, thunderstorms, and hailstones that have flattened standing crops, blackened grain, and deepened the despair of a farming community that was already stretched well beyond its limits.

Akram Ali, a farmer from Chak No. 28-GB in Faisalabad, said he and his family worked day and night across the entire growing season, leaving no stone unturned. “We have faced all weather conditions,” he told reporters. “We remain hopeful, but the rains have tested us like never before.” It is a sentiment echoed from Multan to Mandi Bahauddin, from Gujranwala to Layyah: the season that promised much has already taken back more than most farmers can afford to lose.

The Scale of Damage

Agricultural scientists are unequivocal: rain benefits wheat in its early stages but becomes destructive at harvest. Prolonged moisture causes grain discolouration, weight loss, and fungal infection, while strong winds cause lodging, flattening stalks and making mechanical harvesting near-impossible. Experts now estimate that Punjab’s wheat output could fall by 7 to 9 percent this season, with some internal government assessments warning of losses reaching 10 percent.

Internal estimates place Punjab’s production closer to 21 million tonnes, down from an earlier projection of 22.5 million tonnes. The federal government had set a national wheat production target of approximately 30 million tonnes for Rabi 2025-26. Meeting that number now looks uncertain. The Pakistan Meteorological Department (PMD) had already forecast the storm system that struck in early April, brought by a western disturbance, but timely warning has done little to shield crops when the harvested grain lies in open fields awaiting threshing and shelter is unavailable for most small farmers.

The Price Farmers Receive — and What It Costs to Grow

The federal government approved the Wheat Policy 2025-26 in October 2025, setting the official procurement price at Rs 3,500 per 40 kilograms (one maund). The decision was taken at a high-level meeting chaired by Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif, with federal and provincial governments committing to jointly procure around 6.2 million tonnes from the harvest.

But the figure is misleading in practice. The announced rate functions largely as an indicative price, farmers selling to private buyers and flour mills typically receive around Rs 3,000 per 40kg or less. More critically, the cost of production for the average Pakistani wheat farmer ranges between Rs 2,800 and Rs 3,400 per 40kg and in many cases exceeds the support price altogether. For comparison, India’s estimated wheat production cost ranges between Rs 2,200 and Rs 2,250 per 40kg, less than two-thirds of what Pakistani farmers spend.

The Pakistan Kissan Rabita Committee (PKRC) welcomed the Rs 3,500 figure as a partial victory won through sustained farmer pressure, but maintained that the actual production cost demands a floor price of Rs 4,000 per 40kg. Sindh’s Agriculture Minister separately called for at least Rs 4,200 per maund, warning that failure to offer a competitive price could push growers toward other crops and risk a future food crisis.

Is the Government’s Price Fair?

The honest answer is: barely, and often not at all. When rain reduces yields by up to 10 percent, when the farmgate price falls below the announced support price, and when production costs in many districts exceed what the government will pay, the mathematics of wheat farming in Pakistan do not add up for the small grower.

The pain is not new. Earlier in 2025, the government, under IMF-linked market liberalisation conditions, briefly abolished the wheat support price mechanism that had been in place for five decades. The result was a market collapse: grain prices in Punjab fell to around Rs 2,500 per maund while production costs stood at Rs 3,200. Farmers who were forced to sell at harvest time took heavy losses. The episode ended in protests, demands for reinstatement, and the eventual October 2025 policy reversal, though critics note it came too late and still at a price below what many farmers need to survive.

What Farmers Actually Need

Pakistan’s wheat farmers are caught between an increasingly erratic climate, where March heatwaves shrink grain and April storms flatten what remains, and a pricing structure that has never fully reflected the true cost of cultivation. The Rs 3,500 support price is better than the chaos that preceded it. It is not, as the numbers make clear, enough.

What farmers need is not merely a price announcement but active procurement, timely climate-adaptive support, and relief mechanisms that respond quickly when weather inflicts losses beyond any grower’s control. Until those conditions are met, the harvest season will remain what it has become for too many families across the Punjab plains: a gamble against the sky, priced by the state, and lost most often by the farmer.