Crop Burning in Punjab

This project evaluates if subsidising green agriculture technology can help reduce air pollution by shifting farmers away from crop burning, by considering the impact on fire incidence, pollution, and agricultural yields.

Pakistan’s air pollution, some of the most severe in the world, poses a serious public health threat. In Punjab province, home to approximately 110 million people, an estimated 20% of air pollution is caused by burning crop residue, primarily during the narrow two-week period between rice harvest and wheat sowing. Stubble burning is the result of the mechanisation of rice harvest; now, a new generation of mechanised equipment is poised to address the externalities from burning. In 2020, the Punjab Agriculture Department (AgriPunjab) launched a programme to subsidise equipment (rice shredders and Happy Seeders) that incorporates rice stubble back into the soil, mitigating the need to burn. These machines are designed to address stubble burning but may also yield benefits through better soil quality and sowing techniques. In its first two years, AgriPunjab implemented a public lottery to randomly select 500 subsidy recipients, out of approximately 2000 qualified programme applicants in 15 major rice-growing districts in Punjab. With the support of Pakistan’s Punjab Province Department of Agriculture, UChicago, IGC, CERP and PxD are designing an experimental study of the Punjab Agriculture Department’s (AgriPunjab) Mechanised Management of Rice Crop Residue (MMRCR) program. The study will examine the impact of the program, making use of administrative, satellite, and primary data, on the incidence of fires, crop yields, farmer profits, air pollution, and soil quality.

CERP has partnered with UChicago, Precision Development and Government of Punjab to evaluate the MMRCR program. This evaluation will generate results on the intervention’s impact on fire incidence, pollution, and agricultural yields and will produce knowledge that will enable designing possible future interventions that will mitigate crop burning in Punjab, thus reducing smog and improving air quality in the province.

The evaluation of the MMRCR program will use remote sensing data, administrative data, in-field spot-checks for crop residue fires, farmer surveys, and focus groups. In-field spot checks are expected to be completed during the current rice harvest, followed by focus groups planned after rice harvest and wheat planting. Farmer surveys are expected to be completed in later 2022/early 2023 after wheat and rice harvests, respectively. The objective is to combine spot check observations with high-resolution satellite data to train a model that predicts crop burning status across all farms in the sample based on visual indicators.