The Punjab government is working to incorporate Artificial Intelligence (AI) into the daily lives of farmers, with the provincial leadership arguing that data and technological transformation can help improve agricultural productivity and farmers’ incomes. Parliamentary Secretary for Agriculture Osama Leghari stated this while speaking as chief guest at the Pakistan Agricultural Coalition’s (PAC) Agri Connections Conference and Expo at the Lahore Expo Centre, held in partnership with Punjab’s Agriculture Department. “I hope that during the remaining two-and-a-half years of our tenure, we will successfully lay the foundation through which our farmers will have access to AI and will be able to forecast their yields and productivity,” Leghari said, adding that the government had declared the current year the “Year of the Value Chain.”
Leghari said the provincial government was encouraging its partners, including the corporate sector, to work directly with farmers and add value to their products so that middlemen are eliminated, farmers receive a greater share of returns, and the corporate sector also profits. The AI push connects to a broader initiative Punjab has been building since September, when Adviser to the Chief Minister on Artificial Intelligence and Special Initiatives Ali Dar said the province was moving swiftly towards becoming Pakistan’s first fully AI-enabled province, following a meeting between the Agriculture Department and the Office of the AI Delivery Unit focused specifically on integrating existing agricultural data and systems with AI to improve planning, productivity, and decision-making in the sector.
Advisor to the Federal Finance Minister Adnan Pasha told the conference that Pakistan faced two existential threats beyond traditional security challenges, climate change and population growth, both closely linked to food and water security. He said the country’s agricultural transformation could not be financed through the public sector balance sheet alone, stressing the need for public-private partnerships in which government provides the ecosystem and a risk-sharing baseline, pointing to the World Bank’s Country Partnership Framework with Pakistan, which includes a dedicated focus on the agriculture-climate nexus. Pasha identified certified climate-resilient seeds and improved on-farm water management as priority areas requiring private investment, arguing Pakistan needed more economic and nutritional value from every unit of water it already has.
Kazim Saeed, Chief Executive of Pakistan Agricultural Coalition, said in his welcome address that the conference provided a platform to explore ways to accelerate development of the agriculture sector amid rapidly changing global trade dynamics and shifting capital flows. He said Pakistan’s agriculture needed stronger leadership, pointing to the country’s continued reliance on imports for commodities it has historically grown, including wheat, cotton, and lentils, attributing this partly to low competitiveness and partly to food safety concerns. During a session held in partnership with the World Bank on food security in changing trade dynamics, Olivier Durand, the World Bank’s Lead Agriculture Specialist, said Pakistan’s agricultural production remained highly fragmented compared with other countries, with a large number of small farmers poorly connected to markets, processors, and off-takers, a gap he said affected both affordability of healthy diets domestically and the country’s broader trade prospects despite Pakistan having doubled agricultural production over the past 30 years.
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