In Pakistan the agricultural surpluses, rural incomes, and industrial inputs produced by millions of farm households residing in irrigated plains, helped fuel the country’s growth and development well into the early years of this millennium.

Pakistan’s agricultural sector and rural economy have a central role to play in national development, food security, and poverty reduction. Since independence in 1947, the country’s rich natural resource base, its hardworking farmers, and its rural communities have done much to drive national economic growth and development. Aided by public investments in irrigation, roads, agricultural technology, and market development, agriculture was at the heart of Pakistan’s economic growth trajectory through the country’s first four decades. But the subsequent decline in evidence-based policy making on agricultural-sector issues has changed the prospects for the rural economy’s role in Pakistan’s development.

As a result, growth in the rural economy has lost momentum, leaving Pakistan’s rural population to face continuing high levels of poverty, and food insecurity, as well as limited access to the public services and markets required for a modern economy. Today, the country’s rural poor make up 76 percent of the poor population, but only 9 percent of the overall population (Pakistan Economic Survey). Addressing their needs will require renewed attention both to agriculture and to investments in rural development more broadly.