The next food crisis in Pakistan may not begin with empty markets or rising food prices. It could emerge much more quietly in our soils, our crops, and the nutritional quality of the food we eat.
For decades, food security in Pakistan has been measured through a narrow lens: how much wheat was produced, how many tonnes of grain were harvested, and whether strategic reserves were sufficient. Those indicators remain important, but climate change is exposing the limitations of this thinking. The real question is no longer how much food we produce, but whether our food system can continue to provide nutritious food under a changing climate.
Southern Khyber Pakhtunkhwa stretching across Dera Ismail Khan, Tank, Bannu, Lakki Marwat, and Waziristan illustrates this challenge more clearly than most regions. Rising temperatures, increasing water stress, recurrent droughts, and degrading soils are beginning to reshape agriculture. Yet the region rarely features in national discussions on climate resilient food systems.
This silence is surprising. Southern Khyber Pakhtunkhwa is not a marginal agricultural landscape. It produces wheat, gram, oilseeds, fruits, vegetables, and livestock, while also serving as an important transition zone between irrigated farming and Pakistan’s drylands. If climate adaptation is to succeed anywhere, it must succeed here.
Yet our research priorities tell a different story. Most agricultural studies continue to ask how to increase yields. Far fewer ask whether crops are becoming less nutritious, whether soils are losing their productive capacity, or how water scarcity is changing the quality not just the quantity of food. These are no longer academic questions; they are questions of national food security.
Perhaps the greatest gap is not financial but intellectual. We still approach agriculture through isolated sectors crop production, irrigation, nutrition, livestock, and climate when they are, in reality, parts of the same system. A food systems perspective demands that we understand how climate, soil, water, markets, nutrition, and rural livelihoods interact. Without that shift, policy will continue treating symptoms rather than addressing underlying vulnerabilities.
Equally important is the geography of policy attention. Pakistan cannot build climate resilience through solutions designed primarily for its better studied agricultural regions. Semi arid districts such as Dera Ismail Khan and Lakki Marwat require locally generated evidence, locally adapted technologies, and long term research investments. National averages often conceal regional realities.
The future of Pakistan’s food security will not be decided solely in the country’s most productive farming districts. It will also be shaped in places that have received far less scientific attention but face far greater climatic pressure. Southern Khyber Pakhtunkhwa deserves to be seen not as the periphery of Pakistan’s agricultural economy, but as one of its most important testing grounds for climate adaptation.
The defining question of the coming decades will not be:
How much food did we produce?
It will be:
What kind of food system did we build and who did we leave out while building it?
Prof. Dr. Sadaf javeria
Gomal university Dera Ismail khan
