Vegetable prices in Pakistan: why they move so fast
What tomatoes, potatoes, onions, carrots and lettuce cost in Pakistan, why vegetable rates swing so violently, and how far a farm-gate price sits from a retail one.
Rates updated:
5 min readBy Mehran Yusuf
The short answer
Vegetables are the most volatile food prices in Pakistan by a wide margin — a tomato rate can double in a fortnight and halve again a month later, which happens to no other category on this site. The reason is that vegetables cannot be stored, cannot wait for a better price, and are grown by thousands of small farms that all plant and harvest at roughly the same time. What follows is what we see from the growing end of that.
Vegetable rates
Any vegetable price quoted without a date is close to worthless, which is why the review date sits at the top of this page. We publish ranges and name the source of each, and where we grow the crop ourselves you can see our own gate price against the retail one.
Vegetables & fruit — observed ranges, PKR. Ranges, not fixed prices.
Item
Farm gate / mandi
Retail
Ours
Source
Tomatoes†ٹماٹرThe widest swing of anything we grow — this range is a yearly one, not a weekly one
Cherry tomatoes†چیری ٹماٹرA different crop from field tomatoes, grown under cover and priced several times above them.
—
₨400 – 900 / kg
We don’t sell this
National average
Beetroot†چقندرWinter crop. Cheapest between December and February.
—
₨60 – 140 / kg
We don’t sell this
National average
† Indicative. These rows are compiled from market knowledge and trade rates rather than checked by us this month, and we are working through them. Rows without the mark are either our own transactions or figures we have verified directly — that distinction is the point of publishing this at all, so we would rather show it than quietly average the two together.
These are ranges we observe, not fixed prices: rates move with city, season and quality, and a farm-gate figure is never what you pay at a shop counter. Where we sell the item ourselves, the price shown is the one you are charged at checkout.
Why vegetable prices swing so violently
A tomato cannot wait. Once it is ready it is ready, and within about a week it is worth nothing, so the grower has no ability to hold out for a better rate — which is the mechanism that stabilises the price of wheat or rice and simply is not available here. When everyone's crop comes in at once the price collapses; when a hot spell or a flood takes out a district's planting, there is no stored supply to release and the price spikes.
The second mechanism is that the response to a spike takes a season. High tomato prices in one year mean everybody plants tomatoes for the next, which produces a glut and a crash, which means fewer plant the year after. Farmers know this pattern perfectly well and still cannot individually escape it.
The third is transport. Vegetables are heavy, bulky and perishable, so the price in a city is closely tied to the cost and speed of getting them there. Fuel price changes show up in vegetable prices faster than in almost anything else you buy.
City vegetable rate lists, and what they are for
Most Pakistani cities publish an official daily vegetable and fruit rate list, issued by the district administration or the market committee and enforced, in theory, on retailers. Lahore, Karachi, Rawalpindi and Faisalabad all do this and the lists are widely reprinted. They are genuinely useful as a reference point and they are routinely ignored at the counter, which is why the price you are asked and the price on the notified list often differ by a wide margin.
The gap is not simply defiance. A notified rate is usually set off the wholesale sabzi mandi price on the morning it is issued, and a retailer who bought yesterday at a different price, sells over two days, and throws away a share of the leaf vegetables in a Sindh summer is not working from the same arithmetic. Enforcement is real but patchy. Treat the list as the floor of what is reasonable rather than as the price.
The mandis themselves are where the number actually gets made — Lahore's wholesale market, Karachi's Sabzi Mandi on the Super Highway, and the district markets feeding the smaller cities. Rates in a city track its own mandi, and a city that grows its vegetables nearby prices below one that trucks them in. That is most of the difference between what a kilo of tomatoes costs in Hyderabad and what it costs in Islamabad on the same day.
Farm gate against retail: where the money goes
The gap between what a grower is paid and what a shopper pays is wide and it is not simply profiteering, though it is not free of that either. Between the field and the counter sit a commission agent in the mandi, transport, wastage — which for leaf vegetables in a Sindh summer is substantial and is priced in — and the retailer, who takes their margin on what survives rather than on what they bought.
Where growers genuinely lose out is in having no way to wait and no way to reach a buyer directly. That is the honest case for buying farm-direct, and it is a smaller case than it is usually made to sound: we remove the middle of that chain, and then we add a delivery cost, so the saving on a kilo of potatoes is not dramatic. What changes materially is how many days ago it was cut.
Seasonality is most of the price
A vegetable in its own season, grown near you, is both the cheapest and the best version of itself; the same vegetable out of season is expensive because it has been trucked from a cooler district or grown under cover. Carrots in a Sindh winter and carrots in June are two very different purchases at two very different prices.
Our seasonal calendar sets out the planting and harvest windows for what we grow, month by month. Reading a price alongside the season it was taken in explains most of what looks inexplicable about vegetable rates.
Common questions
Why do tomato prices change so much in Pakistan?
Because tomatoes cannot be stored. A grower cannot hold the crop back for a better rate, so a glut collapses the price within days and a shortfall spikes it with no stored supply to release. The correction takes a whole season, which produces the boom-and-bust cycle the market is known for.
What is the difference between a farm-gate price and a retail price?
The farm-gate price is what a grower is paid at the field. Retail adds the mandi commission, transport, wastage — which is high for perishables in the heat — and the shop's margin. Both are real prices; they answer different questions.
Is buying vegetables direct from a farm cheaper?
A little, not dramatically. Removing the middle of the chain saves something and then delivery costs something back. The material difference is freshness — days since cutting — rather than the price.
When are vegetables cheapest in Sindh?
In their own season, at the peak of the local harvest, when supply is at its highest and nothing has been trucked in from elsewhere. Our seasonal calendar sets out the windows crop by crop.
