Business Recorder Editorials 29th August 2026

An olive branch to the import bill

EDITORIAL: Pakistan’s decision to launch a National Olive Value Chain Policy is exactly the kind of practical intervention the economy has needed for years. The country spends around $4 billion annually on edible oil imports, according to the prime minister, and even a 10 percent reduction in that bill would save roughly $400 million in foreign exchange.

For an economy that routinely runs short of dollars, borrows to stabilise reserves and struggles to finance essential imports; that is no small matter. The more obvious question is why such a strategy took so long to acquire serious policy attention.

The logic is straightforward. Pakistan cannot continue treating import dependence as an unfortunate fact of life. Reducing the import bill is now a national economic requirement, particularly in areas where domestic production can realistically substitute for foreign supply. Edible oil is an obvious candidate because the country already has a developing olive sector, millions of olive plants, and external technical support that can be converted into a much larger agro-industrial base.

The new policy gets an important part of the equation right by looking beyond cultivation alone. Olive production will only become economically meaningful if farming is connected to processing, extraction, quality certification, branding, and export development. That is what turns a crop into a value chain. The decision to send agricultural graduates to Italy for advanced training and to build on existing cooperation in nurseries, laboratories and technical education should therefore be welcomed.

But this policy also exposes a wider failure in Pakistan’s agricultural and trade planning.

The country has allowed several areas of natural comparative advantage to deteriorate through weak policy, poor execution and distorted incentives. Cotton provides the clearest example. Domestic production has fallen sharply over the years, forcing greater reliance on imported raw material for the textile sector that remains Pakistan’s flagship export earner. Wheat has also repeatedly moved from abundance to shortage and import dependence because procurement, storage and market management have failed to provide consistency. These are not isolated agricultural mishaps. They reflect the absence of a coherent production and trade strategy.

That absence has imposed a recurring cost on the external account. Pakistan tends to respond to foreign exchange pressure after it appears rather than designing domestic production around predictable import requirements and global export opportunities. A serious economic strategy would identify the products the country can efficiently substitute at home, the sectors in which it can build export competitiveness, and the infrastructure, technology and incentives required to achieve both. Import substitution and export promotion should form two sides of the same external-sector policy.

Olives fit neatly into that framework. The immediate objective should be to reduce edible oil imports without sacrificing quality or imposing inefficient protection on consumers. Over time, however, the ambition should go further. Pakistan’s membership of the International Olive Council, growing local expertise and potential access to regional markets create an opportunity to develop olive oil as an export product as well. That will require consistent standards, traceability, branding and private investment, all areas where government must facilitate rather than micromanage.

The challenge, as always, will be implementation.

Pakistan has produced no shortage of promising agricultural policies. Too many have weakened once they reached the stage of coordination between federal and provincial governments, farmer support, research, extension services and market development. The olive policy will only succeed if progress is measured against hard outcomes: acreage brought under productive cultivation, oil produced, imports displaced, processing capacity created and exports generated.

The country can no longer afford agricultural policy built around announcements and targets disconnected from trade realities. Every unnecessary dollar spent on avoidable imports adds pressure to an already fragile external account. Every export opportunity missed makes that pressure worse.

The olive initiative is therefore welcome, but its real value lies in the principle behind it. Pakistan must begin systematically producing more of what it imports and exporting more of what the world wants. That should have been common sense long ago. It has now become an economic necessity.

Tarbela’s runaway cost

EDITORIAL: With the Executive Committee of the National Economic Council (Ecnec) approving the Tarbela fifth extension project at a staggering Rs316 billion on August 22, the undertaking’s extraordinary cost escalation demands a hard look at how it was planned, managed and executed.

Originally sanctioned in 2016 at Rs82.3 billion, its cost has soared by an eye-watering 282 percent, adding more than Rs234 billion to the bill. For a country struggling with debt, fiscal constraints and mounting demands on scarce public resources, this is a serious indictment of institutional competence, financial discipline and accountability.

The massive cost escalation though is only one part of the story. The circumstances that brought the project to this point are equally troubling, as evident from Planning Minister Ahsan Iqbal’s unusually pointed criticism of Wapda and the personnel responsible for its execution.

At a meeting of the Central Development Working Party (CDWP) back in May, he had questioned the project’s management, transparency and oversight, while highlighting findings of a Ministry of Water Resources report into a breach that had occurred in the project’s downstream cofferdam.

The findings of that report were damning, to say the least. It had attributed the breach not to flooding, as might have been expected, but to a design change from roller-compacted concrete to a rock-fill dam, inadequate supervision, and delayed administrative action. The result was a costly chain of events marred by structural failure, prolonged delays and mounting financial losses.

Questions were also raised over the appointment of a local consultant for the project whose credentials were considered dubious, after an international consultant had been replaced through what the planning minister had described as a non-transparent process.

More astonishingly, consultancy costs have soared by 550 percent, from Rs1.8 billion to over Rs19 billion. These numbers raise an obvious question: how did a project approved for Rs82 billion reach a point a decade later where expenditure had already exceeded Rs140 billion, while the revised estimate has now climbed to Rs316 billion? And, more importantly, who is accountable for the decisions that produced this outcome?

The finance ministry has also sought justification for the escalation, particularly as the project is financed by international financial institutions, and asked Wapda to explain how the resulting loans will be repaid.

It is also important to note that the planning minister had ordered an inquiry committee to examine the project’s mismanagement and the performance of its contractors and consultants, with its findings to be placed before Ecnec. Yet Ecnec approved the project despite no apparent evidence that the findings were submitted to it.

Tarbela’s importance to national water security may have necessitated the approval, but that cannot give Wapda or other stakeholders responsible for its execution a free pass. If concerns about design, procurement, consultancy, oversight and financial management can be identified before approval, yet the project still proceeds without those concerns being satisfactorily resolved, what purpose does scrutiny serve?

Tarbela is too important to Pakistan’s water and energy security to become another monument to institutional failure. Every rupee lost to avoidable delays and poor decisions is a rupee unavailable for other urgent national priorities. Nor is this an isolated episode.

Massive cost overruns and execution failures have become a recurring feature of Pakistan’s public sector development landscape. Ecnec’s approval must therefore not be the end of the matter.

There must be a rigorous, independent determination of responsibility. Those whose decisions, negligence or failures of oversight contributed to the escalation must be identified and held accountable.

In a country where public finances are under extraordinary strain, a 282 percent cost increase cannot simply be absorbed by the exchequer and forgotten. At some point, incompetence must have a cost for those responsible for it.