More cotton, less sugarcane

Pakistan is experiencing chronic water stress. Apart from the threat posed by India to upend the Indus Waters Treaty, we should recognise that the proper allocation and use of water within the country in agricultural production is a potential water saving measure that could relieve our water scarcity to some extent.

One of the ways to mitigate water stress is to reduce the cultivation of sugarcane, a crop that consumes disproportionate amounts of water for increasingly marginal economic returns (not to mention the diabetes epidemic it has helped to promote in the country).

Sugarcane currently occupies around three million acres of farmland in Pakistan, mostly in Punjab and Sindh. Estimates from Wapda and the International Water Management Institute (IWMI) suggest that sugarcane consumes between eight million and 12 million acre-feet (MAF) of water per year. While accounting for only about 5.0 per cent of the country’s total cropped area, sugarcane cultivation accounts for 15-20 percent of total water usage in agriculture. According to research conducted by the Pakistan Institute of Development Economics (PIDE), sugarcane uses approximately three and a half times more water per acre than cotton.

Cotton now covers around five million acres ¬¬– down from 7.3 million a decade ago – but supports 0.7 per centof GDP and underpins 58.5 per cent of the country's exports through the textile industry. Cotton's role in foreign exchange earnings and employment far outweighs that