By Staff Reporter
ISLAMABAD: Pakistan’s farmland is fracturing into smaller and smaller pieces, and the water that irrigates it is slipping out of state hands entirely, according to the country’s newly released Agricultural Census, a survey that offers the most complete statistical picture yet of a rural economy in the middle of an unplanned transformation.
The census, the seventh since independence and the first to merge agriculture, livestock and farm-machinery data into a single digital exercise, found that the number of farms in the country climbed to 11.1 million in 2024 from 8.26 million in 2010 — a 34% increase — while the total area under cultivation grew just 12%. The result: average farm size has fallen to 5.3 acres from 6.4 acres in under a decade and a half, a pace of fragmentation with few parallels among major agricultural economies.
Beneath the soil, an even larger shift is under way. Groundwater pumped through privately owned tubewells has overtaken the canal networks that Pakistan’s colonial and postcolonial state spent more than a century building and administering. And the machines doing the pumping are now, for the first time, mostly powered by the sun.
“The census should be read in a critical but constructive spirit,” the report’s authors note, arguing that the same data the state uses to govern can just as easily be turned into a tool for citizens to demand accountability. Fieldwork for the census was conducted in two phases between September 2024 and February 2025, using tablets, GIS mapping and real-time monitoring across a sample of mouzas and urban blocks, with exceptionally large landholdings counted individually. That sample-based design marks a departure from methods used before 2010 and invites more scrutiny of the results than a full count would.
A Nation of Smaller, More Divided Farms
The fragmentation data point to a deeper structural problem than farm size alone. The number of holdings split across multiple non-adjacent parcels rose to 4.98 million from 2.83 million over the same period, and the average fragmented farm is now carved into seven separate pieces, up from three in 2010 — a 133% increase in parcels per holding.
Scattered plots raise the cost of nearly everything a farmer does: ploughing, irrigating, guarding crops against theft and settling boundary disputes with neighbors all become more expensive and more time-consuming as holdings splinter. Investments that only pay off at scale — laying a watercourse, levelling a field, buying or renting machinery — become harder to justify on a single postage-stamp plot, let alone seven scattered ones.
Inheritance customs are the primary driver. Land titles are divided among heirs after each generation, and the operational holding is typically divided along with them. Women, the census suggests, are still routinely denied their legal shares of inherited land, compounding fragmentation with gender inequity.
The fix is not to weaken inheritance law, but to separate legal ownership from day-to-day operation, allowing heirs to hold distinct titles and income shares while farming adjoining parcels as a single unit. Mechanisms already exist elsewhere: producer cooperatives, family farm companies, shared-machinery pools, digital lease markets and voluntary land swaps can all build scale without forcing anyone off their land. What is missing in Pakistan’s case is the institutional scaffolding — cadastral maps, low-cost lease registries, standard contracts, fast dispute resolution — along with enforcement that ensures women heirs are recorded as members, paid directly and given real exit rights.
Tubewells Overtake the Canal, and Solar Overtakes Everything
Pakistan’s irrigation map has been redrawn. Total irrigated area rose to 45.9 million acres in 2024 from about 34.1 million in 2010. But canal-only irrigation, while still growing in absolute terms to 14.5 million acres from 12.3 million, saw its share of the irrigated total slip to roughly 32% from 36%. Land irrigated by both canals and tubewells together edged down to 13.5 million acres from 13.9 million.
Tubewell-only irrigation is where the real movement happened, more than doubling to 14.1 million acres from 6.1 million and lifting its share of irrigated land to about 31% from 18%. The number of tubewells and lift pumps nationwide nearly doubled to 1.83 million in 2024 from 0.93 million in 2004.
What has changed most is not that farmers are pumping groundwater — they have been for decades — but what powers the pump. Solar power was a negligible presence in 2004; it now drives an estimated 960,000 of the country’s 1.83 million tubewells and lift pumps, roughly half the national stock and more than diesel- and electric-powered pumps combined. Diesel use has receded as fuel prices climbed, and grid electricity remains a minority choice, held back by supply that is both costly and unreliable.
In the span of two census cycles, solar has moved from statistical noise to the single largest power source irrigating Pakistan’s farmland — a shift with almost no accompanying policy architecture. There is no coordinated financing program tied to the technology’s adoption, no groundwater-metering requirement linked to the subsidy-free upfront cost that made solar attractive in the first place, and no basin-level plan for a future in which pumping is constrained only by daylight rather than by a diesel or electricity budget.
The social implications run as deep as the engineering. Pakistan’s canal system, built under British rule, tied water access to settlement policy, official schedules and the decisions of irrigation officials and upstream users — a structure of collective discipline enforced by the state. A tubewell hands the farmer control over timing. Solar reinforces that independence further, converting a recurring fuel or electricity bill into a one-time capital outlay. What that means for rural bargaining power relative to urban Pakistan — whether it strengthens particular rural classes over others — is a question the census raises without answering.
That autonomy carries a cost that does not show up on any single farmer’s ledger. The farmer who pumps groundwater captures the benefit immediately; the consequences — a falling water table, rising salinity, degrading aquifer quality — are absorbed collectively, by neighbors and by future generations. Solar makes each additional hour of pumping feel almost free, which is precisely what makes the coming strain on aquifers hard to see coming. Basic questions remain unanswered at a national level: where water tables are falling fastest, how much of what is pumped gets replenished, who can afford to drill deeper as shallow wells run dry, and how groundwater levels connect to river flows.
There is a possible upside for Pakistan’s cities. If agriculture leans further on groundwater, more surface water could in principle become available for urban, industrial or environmental use. But the census’s authors caution that this is not automatic — it requires basin-level accounting Pakistan does not yet have, and without it, celebrating either a water liberation or a surplus would be premature.
An Everyday Federation, Built on Fruit Crates and Grain Sacks
The census also captures a version of Pakistani unity that owes more to agriculture than to constitutional politics. Provincial specialization in fruit trees is close to absolute in places: Punjab holds about 83% of the country’s mango trees and virtually all of its kinnow trees; Balochistan accounts for 94% of apple trees and 87% of pomegranate trees; Khyber Pakhtunkhwa has roughly 95% of both peach and walnut trees; and Sindh grows 99% of the national banana crop by cultivated area, the most complete specialization recorded for any crop in any province in this census.
Grain and fiber production follow a more concentrated pattern. Punjab accounts for about 58% of wheat area, 62% of rice, 59% of cotton and 69% of sugarcane, with Sindh a consistent second — supplying 26% of rice area and 28% of cotton — and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa producing nearly half the country’s maize. Balochistan contributes 13% of both wheat and cotton area.
No province could reasonably feed itself the full national basket, and the census’s figures — measures of area and tree counts, not output or quality — illustrate why: climate, altitude, soil and generations of accumulated farming knowledge distribute comparative advantage unevenly across the map. A household in Lahore eats fruit grown in Balochistan and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa; a family in Quetta depends on Punjab and Sindh for staple grains. That daily interdependence, the census suggests, is a more durable form of federation than anything argued in parliament.
It cuts both ways for Punjab. The province’s dominance across nearly every staple crop gives it outsized weight in national food security — and means that a bad season there, whether from flooding, heat or a shortfall in canal supply, becomes a national event rather than a provincial one, unlike the fruit-tree specialization spread more evenly across four provinces.
Cotton’s Retreat, and a Water-Intensive Bet
Buried inside the crop data is a warning specific to Pakistan’s textile industry, still the country’s largest source of export earnings. Cotton area fell to 6.51 million acres in 2024 from 9.23 million in 2010, a 29% decline, even as the country’s total cropped area expanded 22% over the same period. Cotton’s share of national cropped area collapsed to under 8% from roughly 14%.
A domestic raw-material base shrinking this quickly, while the textile mills that depend on it continue to expand, points toward Pakistan becoming a structurally larger importer of raw cotton — spending foreign exchange it can ill afford on a crop it was once a major global grower of.
A second, related pattern sits uneasily alongside the cotton decline: rice area grew 15% between 2010 and 2024, a real increase in land devoted to one of the thirstiest crops Pakistan grows, even as its overall share of cropped area slipped slightly as other crops expanded faster. Sugarcane, another heavy water user concentrated in Punjab and Sindh, barely moved.
Climate adaptation logic would typically push farmers toward crops requiring less water per unit of output as rainfall grows less predictable and summers hotter. Instead, the census shows a country expanding its most water-intensive staples in absolute terms — and financing that water increasingly through tubewells rather than canals, drawing on a groundwater account whose balance no institution currently publishes.
Livestock Is Outrunning the Fields
The fastest-growing part of rural Pakistan may not be crops at all. Between the livestock censuses of 2006 and 2024, cattle numbers rose 89%, buffalo 75%, sheep 68% and goats 78%; combined, the four major species grew about 78%. In-milk cows increased 140% and in-milk buffalo 111% — sharply outpacing crop-side growth, where cultivated area expanded 24%, cropped area 22% and orchard area 42% between 2010 and 2024. The two data sets cover different time periods and units, so they are not a direct productivity comparison, but the disparity is wide enough to suggest livestock is becoming an increasingly central source of rural income, household wealth and nutrition — one that national agricultural policy, still organized around crops, has yet to catch up to. Veterinary care, feed markets, breeding programs, disease surveillance, milk collection and cold-chain infrastructure remain, in policy terms, an afterthought.
Reading the Numbers With Caution
The census’s authors are explicit that no statistical exercise of this scale is free of error — sampling limitations, reporting gaps, shifting definitions and the incentives of the institutions that commission the count all shape the final numbers. Respondents forget details or withhold them; governments emphasize the findings that suit them. The recommendation is not to discount the census, but to subject it to independent scrutiny and cross-checking.
The alternative to imperfect data of this kind is not better data — it is governing by anecdote, lobbying and instinct. Taken together, the 2024 census describes a countryside fragmenting in ownership, gaining independence in water use, growing more interconnected through food trade between provinces, and shifting its economic weight toward livestock. Whether Pakistan’s state does more than record those changes — whether it actually governs them — is the question the numbers leave open.
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