Pakistan can add $9.8 billion to agri exports — without leaving home

Why a 23.5% slice of the economy gets a 1.5% slice of the graduates

The episode opens with Muzamil setting the scale of the conversation in numbers, not slogans. Agriculture is 23.5% of Pakistan’s economy. It produces four to five billion dollars of exports. It employs 37.4% of the country’s workforce — roughly one in every three working Pakistanis. And yet, when Muzamil pulls the latest HEC report on where Pakistani graduates actually go, agriculture has fewer than 9,000 students out of the 500,000 to 600,000 currently enrolled. “One third of the entire workforce is exclusively working in the agriculture sector,” Muzamil says, “but in our universities, less than 9,000 are in agriculture.”

That mismatch is the frame for everything that follows. The country has the terrain, the workforce, and the export market. What it does not have is the founder energy, the policy attention, or the data. As part of the ongoing Endeavor Pakistan series — Muzamil’s hunt for the fifty most exciting startups in the country — he brings in two people who are trying to fix that. Jawwad, the co-founder and CEO of AgriLift, and Salar, the chief innovation officer at FFC, Pakistan’s largest fertilizer manufacturer.

How a PwC consultant ended up rebuilding farm economics

Jawwad’s path back to Pakistani agriculture runs through Dubai and Europe. He moved to Dubai with PwC just before the 2008 financial crisis, then spent eight years at EY across Europe, eventually helping set up the largest water utility in Ireland. At a later post as a portfolio value creation manager, the biggest asset in the group was a fertilizer business — and that is where the seed, in his words, was planted.

“Every time we used to look at long-term strategy, where the business needs to go over the next ten, fifteen, twenty, thirty years,” he tells Muzamil, “everything used to boil down to farm economics. Koi bhi cheez agar bechni hai farmer ko ya koi business model khada karna hai farmer ke around — everything was around farm economics or farm economics don’t support it.” If a business kept failing to find a working model around the farm, the problem was not the business. The problem was the farm economy.

He returned to Pakistan with his co-founder Murad and three hypotheses: that data could help farm economics, that a scalable model around the farmer was possible, and that the way to win the farmer was to make the technology disappear behind a layer of simple, plain-language decisions. The first two or three years went into research and validation. Only after that did they ship a product.

Salar, FFC, and a corporate giant choosing to act small

Salar’s introduction is a clean counterpoint. Born in Karachi, raised across Pakistan as a “military brat,” he has roots in a village near Faisalabad where his family still owns land. He left the military and joined FFC six years ago in a strategy role. What he describes finding inside the country’s largest fertilizer producer is the mindset Muzamil names openly — the “sethia mentality” of incumbent industries that no longer feel the need to push.

But Salar argues that mindset is shifting. “FFC mein bhi yeh realization ab aa gayi thi,” he says, “ke yeh jo chemical fertilizer hai hamara — which is the life and blood of the agri sector — we have to move beyond this now.” With 4.3 million tonnes of annual production capacity, FFC is, in his words, the biggest fertilizer manufacturer in the country, which makes the moral responsibility to lift farm productivity heavier, not lighter. The partnership with AgriLift, he tells Muzamil, came from a single observation: Jawwad’s team was not trying to extract value from the farmer. They were trying to enable the farmer to make more money, and only then make money themselves. “Farmer ki jeb mein jab tak liquidity nahi hogi, we could make the best of the product — agar farmer ke pass capacity nahi hai khareedne ki, so that product is just going to lie on the shelf.”

The actual numbers behind Pakistani agriculture

Muzamil presses Salar for the macro picture, and what comes back is a useful corrective to drawing-room confidence. Pakistan has roughly 52.3 million acres of arable land as of the latest 2025 number — but, as Salar warns, “take it with a pinch of salt.” Different surveys produce different numbers; FAO disagrees with the local survey; the uncles on Twitter produce a third figure. The Cholistan reclamation initiative, backed by both the present government and the military, may add three to five million more acres on top of that.

Fertilizer manufacturing capacity sits at about 6.5 million tonnes nationally. Water availability per capita has dropped sharply. Farm implements — tractors, harvesters, threshers, and increasingly drones — are almost entirely imported because Pakistan does not manufacture quality machinery at scale. And seed remains, as Salar puts it, “another very big grey area,” though the recently constituted National Seed Development and Regulatory Authority offers a starting point. The picture Salar paints is not of a single bottleneck but of a stack of compounding ones across water, seed, inputs, and machinery.

Water isn’t scarce — it’s mismanaged. And we are over-fertilising.

Muzamil consolidates what he has learned across roughly a dozen previous agriculture podcasts and offers it back to the guests as a stress test. Of all the water Pakistan consumes, around 80% goes to agriculture, 12% to industry, and 7-8% to households. Europe achieves comparable output with one-fifth to one-tenth of the same water through hydroponics, aquaponics, and tunnel farming. The shortage, in this read, is less of water than of innovation.

Salar accepts the framing but tightens it. “Hum log abhi tak — you know, we are sort of using flood irrigation,” he says. “Duniya mein bahut kam jaga par hai. One of the highest producing countries is Holland — but the point is ke they are not doing flood irrigation anymore, because you waste a lot of water.” That said, scarcity is real too: per-capita water availability is genuinely falling. Both things have to be managed at once.

On fertiliser, Salar goes deeper than the standard “we over-fertilise” line. Pakistani soils are high-pH and calcareous. Phosphorus is often physically present in the soil but not bioavailable to the plant — which is why farmers keep applying DAP even on soils that look phosphorus-rich on paper. FFC, he says, runs five soil-testing labs across the country and conducts “hundreds of thousands of soil tests every year for the farmers free of cost.” The point of those labs is to put the right nutrient in the right place at the right quantity. The analogy he reaches for is medical: “It’s like treating the patient with the right medicine after taking his temperature and blood pressure.”

The ārhti is not the villain — and wheat deregulation is the right call

The next section takes on two of the most politically loaded ideas in Pakistani agriculture. Muzamil notes that his prior guests split evenly on the ārhti — the rural middleman-cum-lender. Half called him a loan shark; half argued he is the only credit institution most farmers will ever interact with.

Salar is unambiguous. “Arhti is a necessary evil if you want to call him that,” he says. “We have actually demonized him so much. Arhti is doing a very important job.” Take him out of the system tomorrow, and “hundreds of billions” of farmer financing disappears overnight. The arhti model is 6,000 to 7,000 years old. It cannot be wished away. What can be built is a parallel channel — small-ticket, preferential loans through the State Bank of Pakistan and commercial banks, with Askari Bank as a starting point. The trick, he says, is the ticket size. Commercial banks meet their agri-loan quotas by lending large amounts to a handful of big landlords. The State Bank needs to cap the per-farmer ticket size so that the loans actually reach small farmers, where the productivity gains are sitting unused.

On wheat, Salar credits the current government with a hard but correct decision: removing the official support price and exiting the warehousing business. Wheat prices have crashed twice and rebounded once already. He expects rice to follow the same pattern this October-November. The political class, he warns, will be tempted to re-intervene the moment urban consumers feel the squeeze. They should not. “It takes time to settle,” he says. “Thori si vibration zyada hongi, but the flight will settle down.”

Before farm, on farm, after farm — and why AgriLift picked the middle

Muzamil shifts the conversation to AgriLift’s actual product, and Jawwad gives him a clean mental model. Every problem in Pakistani agriculture fits into one of three buckets: before farm (financing, seed, inputs), on farm (the growing cycle itself), and after farm (storage, supply chain, export). Each is an industry of its own. AgriLift’s focus, by deliberate choice, is on farm.

For two to three years before building anything, the team did fieldwork. They trained their office boy to operate a drone. They followed farmers from sowing to harvest across Multan, Vehari, Kasur, and Lahore. They imaged farms weekly. The patterns they found were not abstract. Water leaking from an adjacent farm could destroy germination in a strip of land and create a disease epicentre that would spread invisibly through a potato crop before a human ever spotted it. Stunted plants in one section of a field would, on soil testing, turn out to be sitting on a nutrient deficiency that the farmer had no way of seeing from ground level.

What a farmer is doing every day, Jawwad argues, is taking decisions. When to water. When to fertilise. When to spray. When to harvest. Which seed to plant. A good decision produces a good outcome; a bad one quietly compounds. The platform AgriLift built, called Farmlink, exists to turn the data captured by drones, soil labs, weather feeds, and farmer logs into a single timed prompt: do this thing on this patch of land today.

Why this only works as a B2B2C play

Muzamil pushes hard on the unit economics. If the founder is going to claim that a 50-acre farm can triple its returns, the path from data capture to insight to action has to be very tight. Jawwad’s answer is operational, not technical. AgriLift runs a hub-and-spoke model out of roughly 25 small hubs in key farming areas. A drone operator, a soil tester, and an agronomist travel from each hub to multiple farms in a tight cluster, spreading the cost across many acres. The smallest farm in any AgriLift cluster is 0.06 acres.

The go-to-market is B2B2C: AgriLift works through partners like FFC, who already have trusted brand relationships with farmers across the country. A B2C waitlist exists — including non-resident landowners in Karachi, Lahore, Islamabad, Dubai, and the US who want visibility into farms they can no longer visit — but the team has not formally opened that channel. Salar explains why the partnership architecture matters from FFC’s side: “Whatever he does, usko ground par implement FFC se behtar koi nahi kar sakta. Because I am on the ground for the last five decades.”

The longer-term picture is cleaner. AgriLift wants to become a product company with FFC running the last-mile service layer. The closest analogy Jawwad reaches for is Uber: a thin platform on top of an open ecosystem of drone operators, soil testers, and agronomists who work the same farms in shared shifts. The MVP stage, he tells Muzamil, is already behind them. They have proved the revenue model, processed 1.5 petabytes of data in the Rabi season alone, run 25 million images through the platform, and logged 40,000 farm events. The company is 85 people across product and field, with the product side at 40 and operations at 45. Their partner roster — Engro, National Foods, Interloop — is visible on the website.

The $9.8 billion question

Late in the conversation, Salar drops the line that gives the episode its frame. Pakistan currently exports $4-5 billion of agricultural produce a year. The national-average yield per acre is far below what the best Pakistani farmers — not American or Dutch farmers, just the best domestic ones — are already achieving. Close that gap and the additional export potential is, on his numbers, $9.5 to $9.8 billion a year on top of the existing five. “We don’t even have to go international,” he says. “Pakistan mein jo ugaadta hai best farmer, woh uga lo.”

Jawwad layers a second opportunity on top. Farmers generate enormous amounts of data — on soil, weather, inputs, output, financing, yields — and almost none of it is owned, traded, or monetised by them. A platform that lets farmers turn their own data into collateral, or sell it into the input supply chain, is a separate multi-billion-dollar opportunity that almost nobody is building toward. “It’s a hugely overlooked opportunity,” he says, “and generally around the world, the more granular the data on the farm, the higher the value.”

Going global from Pakistan, not despite it

Muzamil returns to a theme that runs through the Endeavor series: the Pakistani founder is too often forced to either solve a thousand prerequisites first or leave. Jawwad and Salar disagree on emphasis but converge on direction. AgriLift is already running pilots with international partners in the US and South America. Salar is clear that he wants AgriLift to go global — “we have talked about this” — but that his own ownership remains domestic. “Mera ona bhi Pakistan hai,” he says, “and I am going to make sure it is a success.”

He adds a point that lands sharply: foreign agri-tech companies are already selling into Pakistan, claiming to do what AgriLift does. “They don’t do the same thing,” he says. The chance to build the better product at home and then compete with them abroad — and bring those dollars back — is, in his framing, the actual prize.

Pakistan in 2050

Muzamil closes with the question he has been asking every guest in the Endeavor series: what does Pakistan look like in 2050? Jawwad reaches for a school memory. “Mere baare mein bhi aur mere kuch doston ke baare mein bhi — humari report card mein hamesha likha hota tha: has potential, does not apply.” That, he says, is Pakistan right now. The raw talent is here. Sixty to seventy percent of the population is youth. Something is bubbling under the surface across minerals, agriculture, and services.

Salar describes himself as a natural optimist who has always looked at the glass as full. “I think Pakistan is poised to do wonderful things,” he says. “We have the mindset. We have the capability. Our people go and do wonders across the world. Why can’t we do the same thing here?”

Muzamil’s own closing reads as a thesis statement for the series itself: short-term turbulence, long-term bullish on Pakistan. The point of bringing on founders like Jawwad and corporates like Salar’s FFC, he says, is to surface the people who are quietly solving foundational problems while the rest of the country argues about politics. “Ten, fifteen, twenty million dollar revenue companies,” he notes, “have been built in the last three years — when everybody else was saying everything was finished.” The agriculture sector, on the evidence of this conversation, is next.