Pakistan's Agricultural Waste Crisis

Pakistan faces a significant agricultural challenge 'waste crisis' as it burns what it grows and discards valuable nutrients, leading to costly imports of chemical fertilizers. By reconnecting cities and fields, waste can re-enter circulation instead of remaining outside the system forever.

SPOTLIGHT

Nadeem Riyaz

6/3/2026

On a cold winter morning in Punjab’s wheat belt, you can watch a farmer commit an act that seems perfectly logical to him and perfectly insane to anyone who understands the soil. He gathers the dry straw left over from his harvest. He touches a match to it. Within minutes, the residue that once held the promise of next year’s crop vanishes into black smoke drifting across the horizon. The field looks clean. His work looks done.

But here’s the catch: he has just burned fertilizer. A few days later, that same farmer will drive to the local market and spend precious rupees on sacks of chemical fertilizer, nitrogen, phosphorus, potash, imported at great national cost. He doesn’t see the irony. And why would he? No one has ever shown him the connection between the smoke in his field and the expense in his pocket.

Pakistan burns fertilizer twice: first in its fields, then in its cities. In Lahore, Karachi, and Multan, the story repeats itself in reverse. Food scraps, vegetable peels, and organic waste from millions of kitchens are dumped into landfills, buried under mountains of trash, or burned as garbage. What could have fed the soil is treated as a nuisance. What could have saved farmers money is treated as a problem to be eliminated. The truth is uncomfortable but simple: Pakistan is not short of nutrients. It is short of connection.

The Broken Loop

Behind this contradiction lie two systems that never talk to each other. The first is agriculture. Year after year, Pakistani farmers extract nutrients from their soil to grow wheat, rice, and sugarcane. When the land grows tired, they reach for industrial fertilizers, expensive, imported, and increasingly unaffordable for small landowners.

The second system is waste. Every season, millions of tons of crop residue, animal manure, and urban food waste are generated across the country. And almost all of it is either burned or dumped. What should be a cycle, soil grows food, food creates waste, waste feeds soil, has become a straight line to destruction.

Nothing about fixing this is mysterious. Composting crop residue is not a rocket science. Turning animal manure into organic fertilizer has been done for centuries. Converting city food waste into biogas slurry is common practice across Europe and parts of Asia. These are not experimental ideas. They are proven technologies. So why doesn’t Pakistan do it? Because no single institution is responsible for making it happen.

No One’s Job, Everyone’s Problem

Here is how the system currently works: waste authorities are judged by how quickly they make garbage disappear. Burn it, bury it, haul it away, just get it out of sight. Agricultural departments are measured by crop yields and how many bags of chemical fertilizer they distribute. Long-term soil health? Not their metric. Nutrient recycling? Not their budget line.

Between waste generation and farm application lies a gaping hole where ownership goes to die.

Into that gap steps the chemical fertilizer industry. And it fits beautifully. Urea and DAP are standardized, predictable, and backed by strong supply chains. A farmer can walk into any market and buy a bag with a guaranteed nutrient content. When you are already fighting unpredictable weather, unstable prices, and rising debt, certainty matters more than sustainability. In that sense, Pakistan’s dependence on imported fertilizer is not irrational. It is the logical result of a broken system. But the cost of that logic adds up quietly.

Every burned field means nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium lost to the air. Every landfill filled with rotting vegetables represents a missed opportunity to feed the soil. Over time, soils that rely only on industrial chemicals lose their organic matter and microbial health. Yields might stay steady for a while but resilience crumbles. The land becomes a drug addict, needing ever larger doses of external inputs just to stay productive.

The Raw Material Is Already Here

Here is the good news: Pakistan already generates almost everything it needs for a partial organic fertilizer economy. Crop residue from rice and wheat. Livestock manures from millions of buffalo and cattle. Urban food is wasted from every kitchen, restaurant, and market. The raw material is not missing. The system that connects waste back to farms is what is missing. So what would it take to build that system?

First, visibility. Right now, waste streams are invisible to planners. No one maps where crop residue is concentrated, where livestock manure accumulates, or where city organic waste is generated. Once you map it, you stop seeing "garbage" and start seeing "input."

Second, coordination. Municipal authorities need to start treating waste recovery as agricultural infrastructure, not just urban sanitation. Agricultural departments need to start caring about where nutrients come from, not just how much urea they sell.

Third, incentives. Pay waste collectors only for dumping garbage? They will dump garbage. Pay them for converting waste into compost or biogas? They will build conversion facilities. Right now, the reward structure is backwards. We pay for disappearance. We should pay for return.

Fourth, private sector engagement. The government does not need to run composting plants or biogas units. But it can enable them through land access, regulatory reform, and initial subsidies to get the market moving. Let entrepreneurs build the facilities. Let farmers buy the products. The state’s job is to unlock the loop, not operate every piece of it.

What the World Already Knows

Across much of Europe, organic waste is no longer seen as a disposal problem. It is a resource. Cities invest in anaerobic digestion plants that turn food scraps into energy and nutrient-rich slurry for farms. The result is less landfill pressure, lower emissions, and healthier soils.

Closer to home, India has begun wrestling with the same crop-burning crisis that plagues Pakistan’s Punjab. In response, states like Haryana and Punjab have experimented with decentralized composting, bioenergy generation, and residue-utilization systems. The transition is messy and incomplete, but the direction is clear: agricultural waste can become productive input instead of environmental liability.

Pakistan does not need to copy these models exactly. Its landholdings are smaller. Its institutional capacity is different. But the underlying principle is universal: waste must circulate economically before it is discarded physically.

No Overnight Miracles and That’s Fine

Let’s be realistic. Organic compost is not going to replace chemical fertilizer next season. Nor should it. A sudden shift would crash yields and ruin livelihoods. The smarter path is blended systems. A farmer might apply 80 percent of his usual chemical fertilizer plus organic compost. Yields stay stable. Soil structure slowly improves. Dependency gradually declines. Trust is built over seasons, not policy cycles.

And here is where it gets interesting: reducing crop burning also lowers emissions and air pollution. That opens the door to carbon credits and environmental financing. What starts as an ecological fix can become an economically self-sustaining transition, not a permanent government subsidy. Pakistan’s agricultural debates are usually about small landholdings, rising fertilizer prices, import bills, and declining soil fertility. All of those are real problems. But beneath them lies a quieter, more structural failure.

Pakistan burns what it grows. It dumps what it consumes. And then it buys back, at great expense, what it already threw away. Think about the absurdity. A farmer in Punjab sets fire to straw that contains nitrogen. A family in Karachi throws vegetable peels into a landfill where they rot into methane. Then Pakistan spends billions of dollars importing chemical fertilizer from other countries. We are paying twice: once to waste our own nutrients, and again to import someone else’s.

None of this requires a revolution. It requires reconnection. Cities can return nutrients instead of discarding them. Fields can receive input from multiple sources instead of relying on a single industrial pipeline. Waste can re-enter circulation instead of remaining outside the system forever.

Pakistan does not lack fertilizer.

It simply throws it away first.

Please note that the views expressed in this article are of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views or policies of any organization.

The writer is a former Pakistan Ambassador and Permanent Representative to FAO, WFP and IFAD and can be reached at nriyaz60@gmail.com

Pakistan's Agricultural Waste Crisis

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