Why price caps are quietly strangling Pakistan's farms

A failure year that built the foundation

Zeeshan Hasib Baig grew up inside the Pakistan Air Force — a Fauji family that moved between Kamra, Peshawar and Karachi, schooling all the way through in Air Force institutions. The town he remembers most fondly is Kamra, near Attock, where the factory colonies meant everyone knew each other by name. Then in 1999 his father took early retirement after Zeeshan’s grandfather died and his grandmother was left alone in Lahore — resigning a stable government career with a young family and no plan, and making it work. Zeeshan treats that decision as one of the formative moments of his life.

The second was his own failure. He didn’t get into university the year he expected to, and took a year off — which he describes, without flinching, as “probably my biggest failure” up to that point. He has come to value it. A forced year of nothing, he tells Muzamil, gave him the space to discover what he actually wanted to do. Muzamil picks up the thread: most young Pakistanis don’t think for themselves until the end of university, by which point it is often too late.

He came back in 2004 and got into everything — UET, GIK, FAST, LUMS — and, following the telecom boom of the era, chose telecom engineering at FAST. He graduated in 2008 with a 3.04, having realised by his second year that hardcore engineering wasn’t his future. The pull was always toward the commercial side.

From the first-ever Ericsson trainee to a LUMS MBA

He joined Ericsson as its first-ever graduate trainee in Pakistan — GTP 001, he still remembers the number — and spent two years discovering he was not, in his words, “that hardcore tech person.” Around the work he was quietly preparing for the GMAT. He scored well, but the good American programmes cost a fortune and weren’t Ivy League, so he stayed and did his MBA at LUMS.

The transition jolted him. Engineers, he says, aren’t trained to speak — they work on paper, heads down. LUMS ran on class participation, and for the first two weeks he and the other engineers thought they’d walked into the wrong place. Once he cracked it, the case-study method clicked: he had always been weak at rote learning and strong at problem-solving, and a case study is just a real problem you solve out loud. He spent a semester on exchange at EM Lyon in France and came back with top grades and a different kind of exposure.

A theme surfaces here that he returns to all episode: attitude over credentials. Given the choice between a credentialed hire with a poor attitude and a less-pedigreed one with the right attitude, he takes the second every time. “Attitude wins over credentials,” he says.

Leaving partner-track Deloitte to come home

After LUMS he went to Deloitte’s consulting practice for seven years. He is careful to demystify what management consulting actually is: a company has a problem — profitability, sales, cost — and brings in a firm whose biggest asset is talent and a global bank of best practices and benchmarks. Consultants interview, diagnose, and hand back a road map. The slides at the end are the least of it; the value is the brain work behind them.

He did well. He was identified as talent, put on a nine-year partner track he was two or three years from completing, and offered a path to the US — a green card, the world’s biggest economy, “crazy money.” He walked away from all of it in 2017.

The reasons were not strategic. He is the only son; both his sisters live abroad; his parents were alone, and he was deeply attached to them. He flew back from Dubai every couple of months just to see family. And he is, by his own description, an incurable optimist about Pakistan. One morning a phone call with his father made the missing-each-other unbearable, and he resigned with no job lined up, confident his savings would carry the family for two years. He also noticed something among the senior people at Deloitte he didn’t want to become: too many of them were divorced or separated, families in one place and themselves in another.

A 2.5-lakh salary and the Careem culture shock

What he came home to was Careem, then a tiny new company in Pakistan. A batchmate set up an interview; he met the country head in transit in Dubai and signed up almost on instinct. The shock was physical. He went from a fancy Middle East tower to a noisy startup floor in Phase 4 DHA Lahore where you could hear the pipes when someone used the washroom. He sat there for half an hour on his first day and nobody knew he had joined. His salary was 2.5 lakh rupees a month — after dollars at Deloitte. Money was tight enough that he and his wife installed one air conditioner first and waited on the second; his father eventually had it installed for them.

He took an operations role launching Careem in Punjab’s emerging cities, and loved it. The early Careem was radically autonomous — every market ran its own playbook, launching cities and services overnight. Faisalabad in two days, Sargodha in one. When COVID hit and transportation shut down overnight with no playbook, the Pakistan team leaned in together and, within weeks, stood up ration distribution, payments on the platform, and a whole food business.

What pulled him most was impact. When Careem stopped, the world stopped — women couldn’t travel, people couldn’t get to work; once the government tried to ban it and captains, customers and media forced it open again within twenty-four hours. He frames a belief he carried out of those years: go for impact, and the money follows. His stock payout from Careem ended up worth more than five years of Deloitte income would have been.

Walking into agriculture knowing nothing

He is candid that he understood nothing about agriculture when he joined it. The route in was sideways. His Careem stock had given him capital, so he started angel-investing in startups founded by the “Careem mafia” — one of them, Taza, in agriculture. While helping that founder, a connection led to Syngenta’s leadership, and what he thought was an investor pitch turned out to be a recruitment conversation for the country-head role.

Syngenta, he explains, is the largest agriculture-input company, organised around seeds, crop protection — pesticides, herbicides, fungicides, plus organic biologicals — and vegetable seeds. Globally it’s number one in crop protection and number three in seeds; in Pakistan it holds the highest market share of any multinational, ahead of Bayer, the old Monsanto and FMC. The heritage name is Ciba-Geigy, which older Pakistanis still recognise. Most of the seed is still imported, though the company is exploring local production now that the government allows seed DNA to be registered — earlier attempts failed because the genetics kept getting stolen.

He brought the consultant’s instinct for working through incomplete data, plus what Careem taught him about managing people more senior than himself. He found Syngenta, to his surprise, even more decentralised than Careem — every country runs its own journey within a global strategy.

The new farming ecosystem, built on one insight

His first read of the sector was that doing what the company had always done would make it redundant. A typical farmer’s life is full of problems that seed and pesticide don’t touch: climate risk that wants crop insurance, a liquidity crunch that wants lending, dependence on middlemen, no spraying labour. So he launched a new digital-services division and brought in Tabish, a founder of Bagh-o-Bahar Kisan — a deliberately progressive move, putting an agri-tech operator inside a legacy agri company.

One early insight reframed the whole channel strategy. Mapping the company’s franchises revealed that an average grower travels as much as twenty-two kilometres to reach one to buy a product. For a company with sixty-five years of history, the channel was far too thin. That drove a hub-and-spoke expansion, an e-commerce app that delivers to the farmer’s door, and a weather-triggered crop-insurance pilot on corn. The model is to become a platform — Syngenta as the engine, with banks plugged in for lending, partners for insurance, an events desk for e-commerce — and it has worked well enough that other countries are now replicating it.

Why the yields stay low

Then the conversation widens to the sector itself, and this is where Zeeshan is most pointed. Agriculture is the backbone of the economy — 22% of GDP, a $70 billion sector — and he holds a near-spiritual conviction that this is where Pakistan can do something big. Improve yields by just 30%, he argues, and the effect is enormous.

His benchmark is Bangladesh, and it stings. Bangladesh cultivates roughly nine million hectares against Pakistan’s twenty-two million, yet its agriculture sector is comparable in output — because it picked one crop, rice, deregulated it, cut the red tape around price-setting, and mastered it. Bangladesh’s rice yield is around four metric tons per hectare against Pakistan’s 2.5.

Pakistan’s failure starts with strategy: we try to do everything at once — sugarcane, rice, cotton — when a water-scarce country leaning into sugarcane and rice is, in his blunt phrasing, “criminal.” The deeper damage is regulatory. Price caps, more than anything, have hollowed out the sector. Cap the price of cotton and there is no incentive to invest in it; cotton acreage falls and water-hungry crops replace it. Cotton’s real problem is upstream, in seed: without secure conditions for multinationals to bring in and locally produce good hybrids — which, for political reasons, isn’t happening — yields won’t move. Corn is the counter-example that proves the case: deregulated, with expensive high-quality hybrids and a strong output price, its yield roughly doubled to tripled in six or seven years — more than any other major crop in the period.

His practical steps are specific: deregulate and stop worrying about the middlemen, because an open market sorts the value chain out on its own; set up incentivised one-village-one-crop cotton zones; and run company-led crop programs from seed to harvest, the kind he says Syngenta already has on the shelf.

Water, fertilizer, and the bill coming due

Two structural problems run underneath everything. The first is water. Pakistan sits among the most water-scarce countries in the world, and roughly 80% of its water goes to agriculture — used at a fraction of global efficiency. Part of the cause is policy working against itself: solar incentives land on tube wells, so cheaper pumping pushes farmers to flood fields rather than conserve. The fix is unglamorous — repair the canal and distribution network first, the most cost-effective lever, and put tax and timing controls on usage so there is finally a reason to conserve. The reason we never innovated on drip is that water was so cheap the need never arrived.

The second is fertilizer, where Muzamil presses harder. The economics, he argues, are propped up by cheap gas that runs out around 2027, after which the core raw material rises three to four times and fertilizer prices follow — a normalisation the sector is avoiding rather than preparing for. Zeeshan adds the soil-health angle: healthy soil needs organic matter above 1.2%, and Pakistan’s is below 1% — made worse by overuse of fertilizer and low-quality pesticides, monocropping with no recovery time, and crop-residue burning. The fix is partly commercial and partly awareness, and awareness in rural areas is social: if the chaudhry over-fertilises, the whole village follows, so the leverage is in government and company education programs.

On taxation he is unambiguous. Tax agriculture properly — progressive, segmented taxation, the same as any other industry — but pair it with a free market and no price caps. Subsidise only where it fosters innovation: seeds and high-tech machinery imports. And taxing land will put pressure on the absentee owners who farm from a distance, forcing seriousness about ROI and widening the tax net at the same time.

Capital that never reaches the land

The episode’s most personal stretch comes when Muzamil describes his own brush with farming — driving the new D.G. Khan motorway past virgin land, wanting a farm of his own, finding 250 acres for the capital he had, and then hitting a wall: the money, but no idea what to do, no one to trust, and a real fear that whoever he handed the land to would simply disappear with it. That, he realised, is the gap. City capital sits idle while rural land goes uninvested, purely on a trust deficit.

Zeeshan agrees this is the unlock, and says the way through runs through public-private partnership, because acquiring land in those areas isn’t possible without the public sector. He points to the government’s corporate-farming push on barren land beyond the cultivated twenty-two million hectares — leasing land that has historically sat fallow, farming it with multiple stakeholders as partners, and exporting the produce while solving food security at home. The condition that makes it good rather than extractive is the one Pakistan got wrong with manufacturing: India required multinationals to localise R&D and production, so Mercedes and Audi built plants; Pakistan asked for nothing, so MNCs could earn and wrap up the moment things got hard. Foreign agricultural investment, by the same logic, is welcome only if it comes with skill development, local R&D, and technology that eventually crowds down to ordinary growers — otherwise the country exports cheap potatoes and keeps almost none of the margin.

A two-hour close on processing, organic, and 2050

Near the two-hour mark Muzamil pulls the lens to the back half of the supply chain. Wastage in tomatoes runs 30 to 40%, sometimes more; storage and transport are full of gaps. But here too the answer loops back to deregulation: when rates rise, investment follows, and storage and cold chains get built. It’s a bitter pill, he concedes — deregulation may spike prices short-term — but the alternative is grinding productivity down while inflation arrives anyway.

On organic he is honest about the timeline. The willingness to pay is real and awareness is rising, and Syngenta itself has a biologicals vertical, but Pakistan is twenty to twenty-five years behind Europe on this curve. He puts real momentum ten to fifteen years out — starting with progressive farmers and biostimulants — unless a large export buyer forces traceability sooner.

He closes the way an optimist would. By 2050 he expects Pakistani-born tech giants on the scale of multiple Careems, an agriculture sector genuinely transformed, and a youth population that is either the country’s biggest asset or its biggest disaster depending on whether the time is used well. His real worry is temperament: Pakistanis swing too hard on sentiment, conservative on bad news and euphoric on good, thinking with emotion rather than the numbers. The numbers, in agriculture at least, point the same way he does — enormous potential sitting under low yields, waiting on a few foundational decisions no one has been willing to make.