Pakistan's farmland is a science problem, not a land problem

From actuarial science in Waterloo to a farm in Pothohar

The episode opens with Muzamil welcoming Saad Tamman, a guest he first met around two years before the recording while Saad was working at the Prime Minister’s Strategic Reforms Unit. The conversation begins, as most Thought Behind Things conversations do, with the long route in. Saad went to Aitchison in Lahore, then to the University of Waterloo in Canada to study actuarial science — applied statistics for the insurance industry, which is where he first understood that risk pricing, stock-market modelling and what would later be called data science all share the same statistical spine.

The cohort started at a thousand students. A hundred and ten graduated. Saad graduated six months early in 2009, straight into the financial crisis, and spent the next year doing odd jobs — a stint at an Egyptian restaurant, twelve-hour shifts on the assembly line at Research In Motion in Waterloo. The decision to come home was triggered by two moments he describes clearly. The first was a conversation with his dean, Mary Hardy. “She said: think about going back,” he recalls — and the fact that the chair of his faculty was telling him this, rather than offering him another lap, hit hard. The second was a Moroccan cab driver in Canada who, on hearing Saad was Pakistani, started mocking the country in the wake of the Sri Lankan cricket team attack. “Mujhe bohot hi ganda laga,” Saad says. He decided to leave.

Easypaisa, Mobicash, HBL Express — and a five-year tour of mobile banking

Back in Pakistan, Saad joined Tameer Microfinance Bank, the back-end arm of Easypaisa. Telco data and financial data are the two large datasets Pakistan actually produces, and at that point one of them — the telco side — was being turned into a banking product for the first time. He describes Easypaisa as humbling for a different reason than most people expect. A commercial-bank branch, he points out, exists to either pull in one large depositor or lend to one large borrower. Microfinance exists because there is an entire economy underneath that branch model that the formal system does not see. “It made me think different,” he says. “I realised that one statistic, that one branch — they’re doing business in a completely different way.”

From Tameer he was picked up to help launch Mobicash with Mobilink, then HBL Express (now HBL Konnect) at HBL. By the time he left for a Fulbright scholarship at Vanderbilt in 2013, he had spent five years on the niche where telco, finance and data overlap in Pakistan. Muzamil presses him on the contrast between the three institutions and Saad is candid: Jazz was a cool but bureaucratic telco, HBL was an old commercial bank that resisted change, and the textbook lessons about organisational behaviour that had seemed abstract in school suddenly made sense.

Why he came back: the bond, McKinsey, and Punjab’s education reforms

Saad is clear that the Fulbright application itself forced him to articulate something he had been circling around. “I’m not really driven by money,” he tells Muzamil. “In Pakistan, you make far more in property than in a salary. So what’s the point of studying — unless you can see something somewhere is changing.” The bond required him to come back and work in or for Pakistan for five years. He came back to McKinsey’s newly opened Pakistan office, as the firm’s second hire in the country, and was staffed on the Punjab government’s education reforms program — at the time, one of the largest public-sector reform engagements in the country.

His description of management consulting is unusually plain-spoken. Senior management at most firms, he argues, does not have the capacity to attack non-routine problems. McKinsey’s value is not technical depth — “any technician will do the 80% solution,” he says — but the discipline of structuring the problem, defining the solution space, and instituting a routine of stocktakes that survives the consultant’s departure. The lead on the Punjab project, Taimur Khan, would later become the reason Saad ended up inside the PM Office. They worked together for a year. Saad left McKinsey in early 2016.

Tunnels, tomatoes, and the day a price control destroyed a season

The agricultural section of the conversation is the one that gives the episode its title. Saad’s family comes from Pothohar, south of Pindi-Gheb, where Tamman is the family name. His father is a doctor; the family farmed but did not live off the farm. Saad spent ten years cycling in and out of agriculture — “thora thora” — before his father told him he was ready to run it on his own.

The story he uses to explain why Pakistani agriculture is broken is not a story about land. It is the story of one tomato season. He had installed tunnels. He had installed drip irrigation. He had a university agronomist visiting twice a month. His production cost was twelve rupees a kilo and he was getting five and a half kilos of off-season tomato from a single plant. A twenty-kilo crate was selling at twelve hundred rupees at the farm gate. “Super profitable,” he says. “Main bara khush tha.”

Then the federal noise machine started shouting about tomato prices. The government opened imports from India and instituted a price control in Punjab. Within a month, the farm-gate price collapsed to seven rupees a kilo against a twelve-rupee cost of production. He had to dump sixty thousand kilograms of tomatoes. He gave up the farm and leased it to a friend who now grows gladiolas and marigolds on it under the brand Gulmaan. “My entire business case died,” he tells Muzamil. “I cannot predict what the rate will be eight months from now when I’m sowing. I had no incentive left.”

The point he wants the listener to take away is precise: the failure was not weather, not yield, not technology. The failure was a one-day political decision in Islamabad that no farmer could have priced in eight months earlier.

Seeds, not tractors: where the real technology gap is

Muzamil tries to push the conversation toward the obvious answers — tractor density, drip irrigation, hydroponics — and Saad gently redirects. “Voh baatein laddh hain,” he says. Those are the old talking points. The real technology in agriculture, he argues, is the seed.

“In agriculture, 70% of the technology is seed.” He frames it through a human analogy. One person has the DNA to grow seven feet tall and rarely need a hospital. Another is physically frail but mentally formidable. You would train each one for a different life. A seed has a DNA in exactly the same way. Sow the wrong genetics and no amount of fertiliser, water management or sunlight will rescue the yield.

Pakistan’s seed performance, by his read, is uneven. Maize has improved drastically. Rice is genuinely world-class — basmati only grows properly on the narrow strip around Hafizabad and Gujranwala, and that geography is a national advantage. Wheat is not good enough. The technology gap is not in the tractor shed. It is in the seed.

A desert called Punjab and a Pothohar farm that harvests its own rain

One of the more surprising passages in the conversation is Saad’s reminder that most of Punjab — including Lahore — was desert before the canal system. The fertile topsoil people associate with Punjab is silt deposited by a hundred years of canal irrigation. “Aap teen char foot neeche jaaye, neeche se ret nikalti hai,” he says. Three to four feet below Kasur, the soil turns to sand.

Pothohar is a different problem. There is no canal water, and groundwater is expensive and limited. So Saad does something simple. He harvests the rain that already falls. He laser-levels his land into narrow terraced strips, the way central Punjab was levelled decades ago, so that when rain comes it spreads evenly across each strip instead of running off the high ground and drowning the low ground. The investment was cumbersome. The result is that his yields are up roughly 60% with no new technology — just water management. “It’s a management problem,” he tells Muzamil. “Barish ho rahi hai. Voh mere par hai ke main us paani ko harvest kaise karta hoon.”

His point is generalisable. Pothohar before the canal system used to feed the entire subcontinent. The land is still there. The opportunity to level it and harvest its own rain is still there. Almost no one is doing it.

A Whatsapp message to Taimur Khan and a seat inside the PM Office

The pivot from farmer to policy adviser happens, in Saad’s telling, over a message. He saw that Taimur Khan had joined PTI and sent him congratulations. Two days later Taimur asked if he could come work full-time, without pay. Saad said no to full-time, yes to part-time, and yes to agriculture in particular — because he had just dumped sixty thousand kilos of tomatoes and had specific opinions about why.

He started with two days a week in Islamabad inside the party’s election management cell — a technocratic unit led by Arbab Shahzad, the former KP chief secretary, with Taimur Khan running the policy strand and Jahangir Tareen and Asad Umar in the orbit above. The brief was to write the hundred-day agenda. Saad is careful to point out that the unit was deliberately walled off from politics. “Hum to woh log the the worst people to be associated with,” he says. “We had to make documents. We had no exposure.”

He describes the day the hundred-day plan was launched at the Marriott in Islamabad in Ramzan, May 2018. He had typed his own number on the RSVP card. The lunch invitation had read “launch at 3:30.” Within hours social media was carrying screenshots claiming PTI was serving lunch during Ramzan. It was the first time he understood, in a small and slightly funny way, what the political environment was actually going to be like. “Voh kaafi weird moment tha,” he says. “Yaar, yeh kis qisam ka tum ne dafter jala diya hai? Launch ko lunch bana diya hai.”

Inside the room: the hundred-day plan and the agriculture transformation program

Saad walks Muzamil through what was actually in the hundred-day plan and what was not. The five-million-houses commitment, he insists, was never meant as a federal construction program — it was a regulatory commitment to make it easier for ordinary Pakistanis to start building. He concedes the implementation drifted. The dams agenda, the FATA reform, civil-service reform, the energy plan, the ten-billion-tree plan — these were the major chapters, and he is clear that the work of the unit was structural rather than political. “Hum ne status quo todna tha. Voh hope barqarar rakhna, voh hamara kaam tha.”

The clearest policy success he claims is the federal agriculture program. He calls it the largest agriculture program any federal government had ever put together, with six sections — crops, water, agriculture markets, small dams, fisheries, and livestock. The framing is the one he keeps returning to throughout the conversation: foreign exchange and food security are the two non-negotiables for Pakistan, and agriculture is upstream of both.

Sugar, SOEs, and the politics of admitting reform is painful

Muzamil presses Saad on the sugar crisis. Saad’s read is unambiguous: the sugar problem is a decades-old political-economy issue, not the invention of any one government. The mill licensing regime — capacity by license — has been free money for whoever holds the license. Cracking it open is politically expensive and economically uncertain in the short run.

On state-owned enterprises he is similarly direct. PIA, Pakistan Steel and the rest are textbook examples of what happens when the state insists on doing everything itself instead of partnering with the private sector. He distinguishes carefully between subsidising a national carrier — which can be defensible if a subsidised seat brings in a foreign visitor who creates twelve jobs on the ground — and running an airline as a state job-creation scheme. The first is policy. The second is a structural drain.

The line Saad keeps returning to is one he attributes to his old economics professor: “If there is no pain, there will be no gain.” Reform hurts. Pretending it does not, or expecting a five-year term to undo decades of accumulated cost, is the move that gets reformers in trouble.

Performance agreements, HR overstaffing, and the limits of disappointment

Late in the conversation Muzamil asks about the performance agreements between the prime minister and his ministers — a less photogenic reform that Saad helped design. The mechanism is simple. The prime minister and each minister agree on a plan. The ministry and its staff own the plan. Quarterly stocktakes track progress. The first impact, Saad argues, is just that a ministry knows what it is supposed to be doing this year — which in the Pakistani public sector is a non-trivial baseline.

He is candid about the harder problem. Government in Pakistan is overstaffed and under-allocated at the same time. “Out of a hundred people, twelve are working and eighty-eight are carrying their weight,” Muzamil offers. Saad does not contest it. He extends it. This is not a public-sector pathology alone — the private sector has the same distribution. The fix is HR allocation, not headcount. Move people to where the work is. Stop pretending the system is choked because it lacks staff when in fact it is choked because the staff is in the wrong place.

When Muzamil asks, towards the end, about the disappointment that educated technocrats who supported the current government now express, Saad does not duck. He places himself in the same category. “Main bhi koi siyasi aadmi nahin hoon,” he says. “I’m here as a technocrat. My expectations have been disappointed in multiple places too.” But he refuses to let the disappointment become the whole story. Government, he reminds Muzamil, is not the state bureaucracy. The two get confused all the time, and confusing them is how most critiques of Pakistani policy end up landing in the wrong place.

Pakistan in thirty years: an ultra-free economy that will survive

By the end of the conversation Muzamil asks Saad the long-horizon question — what does Pakistan look like when Saad is sixty-five? Saad’s answer is unromantic. Pakistan, in his read, is structurally similar to the United States: an ultra-free economy where individual initiative is unusually powerful and the state’s hand is unusually light. “Pakistan will always survive,” he says. “It will always come up with something innovative.” The educated population coming through the system over the next two decades is, in his view, much larger than the cohort the country produced in the 1990s and 2000s. That alone changes what is possible.

Muzamil closes the episode at the seventy-five-minute mark, thanking Saad for one of the more granular conversations the show has carried on agriculture and reform. Saad’s working summary of his own decade, offered earlier in the conversation, is the line worth ending on: “If you want to do something, do something that will change the country. Don’t do anything else. There is literally no point.”