GLOBAL EYE. Wheat diplomacy

For neighbours sharing long borders and cultures (with one of the countries being landlocked), seamless and growing trade between them is a foregone conclusion. Or is it? Over the last 15 years, Pakistan has closed its border on multiple instances with Afghanistan, adding to the sheer unreliability of the trade permissibility on the Af-Pak border. For bilateral trade that peaked close to $3 billion in 2011, the estimates for the current year are less than $1 billion between the two countries.

The border trade blockades put up by Pakistan have ostensibly been a penalising chip to rein in political and security behaviour in Afghanistan. While it can be debated whether this bargaining chip has yielded any positive outcome in Afghanistan, it surely has pushed Afghanistan into seeking other trade partners, successfully. A decline of bilateral trade by 70 per cent over a decade between Pakistan and Afghanistan has been comfortably filled in by other neighbours in central and south Asia.

Take wheat, for example. In 2006, Afghanistan imported more than 50 per cent of its wheat and flour requirements from Pakistan, but that lead has now been taken by Kazakhstan. Estimates show that more than 800 flour mills have been closed in Pakistan due to a decline in exports to Afghanistan, especially in the Khyber-Pakhtunkwa region.

Pakistan currently has stocked 9.7 million tonnes of wheat but isn’t able to export it for lack of a clear policy. Given storage infrastructure limitations, most of this wheat is lying in open storage. The new wheat season starts in four months, compounding the economic woes and promising another difficult year for the wheat farmer in Pakistan.

The last year saw four border blockages by Pakistan, and steep decline of about 26 per cent in its exports to Afghanistan. Any attempts to fuel inflation or trigger a humanitarian crisis in Afghanistan have clearly backfired.

India, in a first, sent across its first shipment of wheat in October this year (through the strategically located Chabahar port in Iran), the first in a series of six shipments totalling 1.1 million tonnes of wheat, on a grant basis.

Sensing ‘wheat diplomacy’ as the apt symbolism for a nation which had been denied import, it could just be the start of focus on export from India to Afghanistan. Though India is Afghanistan’s top export destination (in 2016, $220 million of Afghanistan’s $483 million in total trade went to India, which accounted for 46 per cent of Afghan exports), India is a minor player in exports to Afghanistan, having accounted for just 2 per cent of Afghanistan’s total imports in 2016.

India has continued expanding its reconstruction footprint in Afghanistan; the building of the Salma dam in western Afghanistan and the Afghan Parliament House in addition to the building of roads and railways, has earned India substantial goodwill in that nation. India’s largest foreign aid is reserved for Afghanistan. It is also invested in training its civil servants and security forces.

Though the aid and humanitarian assistance from India is forthcoming, the border blockades and other myopic measures by Pakistan along the Af-Pak give India a unique opportunity to capitalise on growing exports from current levels and embarking upon a new era of trade diplomacy with Afghanistan.

The writer is a geopolitical analyst

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