Abstract
With the objective to understand the optimization behavior of farmers in allocating land, labor and irrigation water,
Linear Programming (LP) analytic technique was applied to 13 Kharif and 7 Rabi crops, using national level data
from 1990-2005. The crops included in the analysis have been occupying 80 - 85 percent of Pakistan’s cropped
area for the last three to four decades. The optimization analysis resulted in bringing up three major natural
resource management issues of the Pakistan’s crop sector to the forefront. First, Basmati rice, mung, fodders of
millet & sorghum, onion and IRRI rice were found optimal Kharif crops relative to sugarcane, maize, maize fodder,
millet, sorghum, cotton and tomato. For Rabi wheat, potato, gram, rapeseed and berseem proved to be optimal
relative to barley and sugarcane, for this period. The results imply that to have an efficient agriculture base
Pakistan should either replace the sub-optimal crops with the optimal ones, or the resource management side of
such crops should be improved with the help sensitivity analysis. Second, cotton and tomato appeared to be
relatively sensitive to labor availability than other crops; they seemed to establish a direct correlation between the
optimality status and labor availability. And third, irrigation emerged as a critical input for IRRI rice in Kharif and for
potato and gram in Rabi season; for these crops the crop optimality was directly correlated to the number of
irrigations applied. In contrast, its opportunity cost is higher than the per unit return in cotton, tomato, wheat and
berseem. This signified that irrigation needs to be managed efficiently in the latter four crops; whereas in the
former three crops use of extra water would help in optimizing
