EDITORIAL: Planning Minister Ahsan Iqbal has once again said all the right things. Speaking at the Karachi Chamber of Commerce and Industry (KCCI), he made a cogent and timely case for reorienting Pakistan’s economic model toward sustainable, export-led growth.
He warned, rightly, against short-term sugar highs that result in painful comedowns – Pakistan’s all-too-familiar boom-and-bust cycles – and insisted that the only way to avoid further economic chaos is to earn more foreign exchange through a robust and diversified export base.
The logic is unimpeachable. Pakistan has indeed long relied on demand-side stimulus and speculative consumption cycles that quickly drain foreign exchange reserves.
Without sufficient dollar inflows from exports, the country remains exposed to external shocks, IMF programmes, and endless firefighting. And as the minister aptly put it, it is time the country recognised the “true VIPs” – those who bring in dollars through value-added exports, not those who shuffle influence through political circles or suck the system dry with unproductive subsidies.
But if all of this is so self-evident, and so clearly a matter of national survival, one must ask why these principles are not already embedded in our policymaking. Ahsan Iqbal is not new to government.
He has held multiple portfolios and served in cabinets during both boom and bust years. His colleagues, too, are not strangers to the policymaking process. And the problems he is now articulating were not born overnight – they have persisted for decades. What then, one must ask, has stopped the government from delivering the shift toward exports that it now so loudly champions?
Indeed, there is no shortage of initiatives. From the 5Es of “Uraan Pakistan” to every other iteration of industrial policy in recent years, governments have always had mission statements and roadmaps.
What they’ve lacked is implementation. And as Chairman BMG Zubair Motiwala pointed out during the same KCCI meeting, Uraan Pakistan remains a “paper programme,” high on rhetoric, low on delivery.
It is a telling indictment that despite Karachi contributing 54pc of the country’s total exports and 67pc of its tax revenue, the city’s business community still has to plead for attention, infrastructure, and policy support.
If Karachi’s exporters – the lifeblood of the national economy – continue to face such bureaucratic inertia and systemic neglect, what hope is there for SMEs, women entrepreneurs, or new entrants that the minister wants to recruit into the export drive?
The proposal to establish a Karachi Export Compliance and Innovation Cell is a welcome step. Assistance with certification, compliance, and trade facilitation is precisely what exporters need to enter and survive in increasingly complex global markets. But again, such an initiative will only be meaningful if it is up and running – staffed, resourced, and delivering results – within months, not years. Otherwise, it will join the long list of well-meaning ideas that never moved beyond the press release.
It is also encouraging to see the minister call out the need for peace, stability, policy continuity, and reform. These are the four pillars, he says, that countries like India, Bangladesh, and Vietnam have used to power sustained growth.
But Pakistan’s struggle to hold on to any of these variables is precisely why it keeps falling behind. And here, again, the challenge is political. Without bipartisan consensus on economic reform and without a bureaucracy empowered by performance rather than patronage, even the most articulate growth strategies are destined to wither on the vine.
No doubt the government deserves credit for identifying the problem and for continuing to beat the drum of export-led growth. But Pakistan’s business community, long accustomed to broken promises and policy reversals, is no longer swayed by statements alone.
The time has come for execution. If this government truly wants to distinguish itself from the ones that came before – and in many cases included the same faces – it must convert its export rhetoric into a serious, long-term industrial strategy that prioritises value addition, supports the private sector, and nurtures new export champions across sectors and regions.
If not, the next KCCI meeting will no doubt feature the same talking points, and the same unmet promises – proof that in Pakistan, we keep diagnosing the disease but refuse to prescribe the cure.
Copyright Business Recorder, 2025
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