Why Pakistan's milk problem is really a policy problem

A farmer who almost wasn’t one

The episode opens with Muzamil introducing a guest who does not fit a single category. Qammar Nawaz grew up in a village near Kharian in central Punjab, attended Army Public School because a military uncle insisted on discipline first, moved to Rawalpindi for his intermediate, and then graduated in electrical engineering from NUST in 2010. He was, by his own admission, more interested in football and cricket than in circuit design. “I was good in design,” he says, “but I wasn’t very good in terms of being deep into the syntax of things.”

After graduation he spent time travelling Pakistan by train — an experience he describes as formative in a way that classroom education was not — before landing a job with an NGO running a UN-backed project on technology road-mapping for Pakistan’s pharmaceutical and surgical industries. That project gave him his first real lesson in industrial bottlenecks. He discovered that Pakistan’s surgical instrument manufacturers in Sialkot could not produce high-value products because the country lacked the basic metallurgy to make them. “If we don’t have ship breaking, if ships are not being broken, the metal problem will come,” he explains. The insight stayed with him: value addition is impossible without first solving the upstream input problem.

Farming entered the picture around 2011-12, not through family tradition but through observation. His region around Kharian had been sending migrants to Norway, Denmark, and the UK since the 1970s, and some of those returnees had begun experimenting with modern dairy. He watched what Jahangir Tareen had done — importing better genetics, improving housing, and above all fixing animal nutrition — and concluded that a smaller version of the same model was replicable on his family’s land holding.

The myth that Pakistani cows cannot produce

Qammar Nawaz is precise about what actually drove the yield improvements in modern Pakistani dairy. It was not primarily genetics, though better breeds helped. The critical missing variable was nutrition. “Pakistan mein human nutrition ke baare mein we don’t care,” he says. “Hum animal ke baare mein toh we are at least not bothered ke kya kha raha hai woh.” An animal, he argues, is more like a machine: it requires a specific input to deliver a specific output. Once Tareen’s operation provided the right feed — and then built its own retail chain to capture the margin — the model proved itself. The myth that Pakistani livestock simply could not produce at global levels was broken.

Muzamil asks about the oxytocin and steroid controversy that had come up in an earlier episode. Qammar Nawaz is measured: the residue of oxytocin in milk is within internationally accepted limits, and cooking reduces it further. The hormone is not the real problem. “Doodh ka jo asal problem hai woh yeh hai ke kisan jab bechta tha, main chalees rupaye mein Nestle ko doodh bechta tha. Main chalees rupaye mein de raha hoon, market mein jo consumer hai usko seer pe mein doodh mil raha hai.” He was selling pure milk at forty rupees a litre. The consumer was buying adulterated milk at eighty. The gap between those two numbers is where the dairy sector’s dysfunction lives.

Adulteration as an economic crime against farmers

This is the section of the conversation that carries the most weight. Qammar Nawaz argues that milk adulteration is not primarily a food safety issue — it is a market distortion that makes honest production economically irrational. When a producer of adulterated milk can undercut a genuine farmer’s price by mixing powder and water, the farmer has no competitive floor to stand on. “Jis din farmer fair competition maangega, do numbri wala karega. Consumer ka sabse pehle faida hoga.”

He is not naive about the policy difficulty. Muzamil pushes back: if you shut down one adulteration operation, the operator buys two more cows and starts again. Qammar Nawaz agrees the enforcement problem is real, but reframes it. Punjab Food Authority already exists. The legal infrastructure is there. The question is why prosecution is not pursued seriously enough to create deterrence. He connects the problem to a broader economic argument: Pakistan’s dairy sector is roughly a twenty-five billion rupee industry. If you allow adulteration to persist, you are effectively subsidising the destruction of a sector that, with proper protection, could grow to 1.5 times its current size within three years. “Jitne bhi janawar hain, unko rakhne wale maujood hain, investment karne wale log maujood hain. Poori chain maujood hai, but we are letting them down.”

The parallel he draws is sharp: Pakistan does not attract Nike or Adidas because it tolerates counterfeit goods. The same logic applies to food. “Jab doodh ki copy aap bech rahe hain, toh why, how can the producer be profitable?”

Why rice works and wheat does not

Later in the discussion, Qammar Nawaz offers what may be the cleanest single argument in the entire conversation. Rice is the only Pakistani agricultural product with recognisable export brands. Why? “Kyunke chawal ke andar government ki intervention nahin hai. That’s the only one field.” Pakistan earns roughly nine hundred million dollars from rice exports. The government does essentially nothing with rice, and it succeeds. Wheat and sugarcane, by contrast, are heavily regulated — prices fixed, exports periodically banned, mills forced to buy at government-set rates — and both sectors are chronically dysfunctional.

He extends this to a specific proposal on sugar. The current sugarcane model is water-intensive, occupies the cotton belt, and produces sugar through a year-long cycle that benefits mill owners more than farmers. His alternative: white beetroot. Europe already produces most of its sugar from beetroot rather than cane. Pakistan has several operational beetroot-processing facilities. A farmer can take a beetroot crop in four months, earn as much as from a full year of sugarcane, and the processing residue becomes animal feed for dairy farmers. “Aap sirf aaj deregulate karein sugar industry ko, kahein ji jaisa behtar hai aap karo. Hum na kisi ko protection de rahe hain.” Crucially, beetroot is a root crop that aerates and softens soil, making it a better predecessor for cotton than sugarcane. Replacing sugarcane with beetroot would simultaneously increase cotton production, reduce water consumption, and generate a new animal feed supply chain.

The corn silage bottleneck nobody is talking about

Muzamil asks about the single most actionable policy intervention Qammar Nawaz would recommend for dairy. The answer is not genetics subsidies, not cheap urea, not veterinary programmes. It is corn silage harvesting machinery at the union council level.

Corn silage is globally recognised as the best feed for dairy cattle and beef production. Pakistan grows maize. The nutrition is available. What is missing is the harvesting and ensiling machinery to convert standing corn into silage before it degrades. Without that machinery, farmers feed their animals whatever is available — straw, crop residue, low-quality fodder — and get a fraction of the potential output. “Pakistan mein jo janawar hai, hamaari bhains hai, yeh sab average daily gain daily ka jo inaka weight gain hai, woh sau dedh sau gram se upar nahin jaata. Inki capacity hai barah sau gram ki.”

He is specific about the scale of the opportunity: with proper corn silage nutrition, Pakistan could achieve 1.5 times current milk production without importing a single new animal. The machinery exists in China and is increasingly affordable. “Agar aap Pakistan mein UC level par corn silage machinery ko kar dein, yeh woh problem solve karegi jo aap — it will — yeh lag raha hai rocket speed. Rocket speed pe aapki production milk ki.”

His ask of government is not a subsidy. It is interest-free financing over five to seven years so that farmers can acquire the machines. The return on that investment, he argues, would appear in the national economy within six months.

Deregulation, taxation, and the absentee landlord problem

Qammar Nawaz is consistent throughout the conversation: the problems he describes are economic, and they require economic solutions, not administrative ones. Government’s instinct to fix prices — for tomatoes, for wheat, for sugar — has never worked and will never work. “It is not an administrative problem. It is an economical problem.”

On land, he is blunt in a way that surprises Muzamil. He supports agriculture taxation. Not as punishment, but as the correct tool to force inefficient absentee landowners — people sitting in Karachi or London who know nothing about their land and extract minimal value from it — to either improve or sell. “Agar ek banda ek acre se do lakh kama raha hai na, aur doosra kuch bhi nahin kama raha, I have to switch to somebody, to some other place.” He notes that Islam’s concept of ushr (a tithe on agricultural produce) already embeds this logic, but the state has abandoned even that. A basic land tax, starting at ten thousand rupees per acre for holdings above ten acres, would begin to unlock land for productive use.

He is equally critical of the subsidy structure. The eighteen hundred billion rupee kisaan package mostly flows through cheap urea, which benefits fertiliser plant owners — whose stock prices rise every year — more than it benefits farmers. “Jakar dariye hain sethon ke paas jinke fertiliser plants hain.” The same money directed toward machinery financing would produce a far larger return.

Water is a usage problem, not a scarcity problem

Muzamil raises water scarcity and offers a framing that Qammar Nawaz largely endorses: domestic users consume only eight percent of Pakistan’s water, commercial users twelve percent, and agriculture eighty percent. Pakistan’s per capita water consumption is two to three times the global average, yet the conversation about conservation focuses on car washing and garden hoses. “Mujhe personally yeh nahin lagta ke Pakistan has a water scarcity problem. Mujhe lagta hai Pakistan has a water usage problem.”

Qammar Nawaz agrees and connects it to the sugarcane-to-beetroot argument: moving away from water-intensive crops is the single largest lever available. He adds that every new agricultural technology — drip irrigation, hydroponics, regenerative agriculture — is inherently more water-efficient than current practice. Taxation of inefficient water use would accelerate adoption. And the barren land that could be brought into production with better canal and irrigation infrastructure remains largely untouched because the government has not built a significant new water distribution system since the British left.

By the end of the conversation, Muzamil asks Qammar Nawaz to look twenty-seven years forward. His answer is cautiously hopeful. The geopolitical realignment underway globally will create new opportunities for Pakistan given its location. The diaspora is a genuine asset. Young people are beginning to take agriculture seriously — “das saal pehle nobody really gave a” about farming as a topic, and now it is being discussed on platforms like this one. But he names one fear: the inertia that has trapped Egypt, Lebanon, and Jordan — where state capture prevents the reforms that everyone knows are necessary — could trap Pakistan too. The difference, he thinks, is that popular pressure is building in a way it was not before. Whether that pressure translates into policy before the window closes is the open question.