Pakistan’s Textile Lifeline Under Water: How the Floods Are Reshaping Cotton, Supply Chains, and Millions of Lives

Pakistan is one of the world’s great textile powerhouses. The industry contributes around 60% of national exports and employs a large share of the industrial workforce, with millions of livelihoods—spinners, weavers, dyers, transporters, and home-based workers—depending on it every day. In normal years, this engine powers global fashion and home textile supply chains. But this is not a normal year.

A Climate Emergency Meets a Textile Economy

Since late June, severe monsoon flooding has inundated key farming belts and towns. Over a million people have been evacuated in Punjab alone, with thousands of villages submerged. Floodwaters have destroyed crops—including cotton, the backbone of Pakistan’s textile sector—and displaced families into makeshift camps. Officials call it the province’s worst deluge in nearly four decades.

These scenes echo the catastrophic 2022 floods, which wiped out about 40% of the national cotton crop, forced mill shutdowns for lack of raw material, and caused multi-billion-dollar economic losses. The lesson from 2022 is clear: when cotton fields go under, textile mills and export schedules soon follow.

Cotton at Risk: What the New Floods Mean for Fiber Supply

Cotton is planted and picked on a tight calendar. Floodwater hitting Punjab and Sindh at the wrong time can slash yields and quality, forcing mills to import more lint or idle capacity. Even before the latest deluges, the U.S. Department of Agriculture had already trimmed Pakistan’s 2025/26 cotton outlook due to weaker plantings in Sindh. Reuters recently warned that new cotton losses now threaten a sector that makes up more than half of exports.

Broken Roads, Slowed Ports: The Supply Chain Disruptions

Floods don’t only drown crops—they break logistics:

• Highway closures are delaying container flows between Karachi port and interior Punjab by several days, raising trucking costs and pushing out shipment windows.

• Urban flooding and worker absenteeism have halted production shifts in export-oriented industrial zones around Karachi, compounding raw-material shortages upstream.

For a just-in-time, buyer-driven industry, those few days of delay ripple into missed vessel cutoffs, longer lead times, and rescheduling penalties.

The Human Ledger: Families Behind the Fabric

Behind every container is a household counting on daily wages. Floods hit the most vulnerable first.

In the 2022 disaster, the International Labour Organization estimated that 2.3–3.6 million jobs were disrupted, with landless laborers and daily-wage workers bearing the brunt. That vulnerability is visible again in this year’s camps and washed-out fields.

Women workers—whether cotton pickers, stitching line operators, or home-based finishers—carry a triple burden of caregiving, paid labor, and recovery work, often with the least social protection. Humanitarian agencies have already reported thousands of homes destroyed and livestock lost, stripping away both income and savings for rural families living on thin margins.

What Global Buyers Will Feel Next

Even as exports showed a modest recovery earlier this year, the new flooding introduces fresh headwinds that global buyers will notice:

1. Price Pressure on Cotton-Rich Lines
   Crop losses and damaged feeder roads raise farm-gate prices and logistics costs. Agri-commodity analysts already note strong upward pressure, and cotton won’t be immune.

2. Shipment Delays and Re-booking
   With inland moves slowed and factory shifts disrupted, exporters will ask for revised ETDs, and forwarders may push later sailings. Port trucking backlogs add further transit delays.

3. Sustainability Setbacks—Unless We Act
   Flood damage can force mills to run older, less efficient equipment longer or divert capital away from cleaner technologies. Yet this same crisis is also a chance to build back stronger and more resilient.

From Recovery to Resilience: What Will Actually Help

Near-term (Relief & Stabilization)

• Direct cash assistance and food security support for displaced farm and mill families, especially women-headed households.

• Emergency logistics corridors—dry routes, temporary depots, and bridge repairs—to clear export backlogs and move inputs inland.

Mid-term (Supply-Chain Hardening)

• Climate-smart cotton: flood-tolerant seed, regenerative practices, and better water management to stabilize yields.

• Traceable, diversified sourcing: dual-source critical fabrics, map cotton origins, and pre-book buffer capacity.

• Finance for resilience: concessional credit to help ginners and mills invest in flood protection, energy efficiency, and wastewater upgrades.

Long-term (Policy & Partnership)

• Align with Pakistan’s five-year textiles policy to boost competitiveness while embedding climate risk into standards and incentives.

• Channel international climate finance toward the cotton-to-cloth corridor, where one dollar of resilience protects many more dollars of export value and wages.

A Call for Global Solidarity

If you’re a brand, mill partner, or buyer, this is the moment to stand with Pakistan’s textile families:

• Place continuity orders with realistic lead times and temporary flexibility on delivery windows.

• Co-fund farmer-level regeneration and mill-level flood defenses—small interventions with huge payback in continuity and ESG.

• Support humanitarian relief—especially for women, children, and daily-wage households who shoulder the heaviest losses when the water rises.

Textiles are Pakistan’s livelihood engine. Keeping that engine running—cleaner, safer, and more resilient—will take buyers’ patience, financiers’ creativity, and donors’ commitment. The devastation of today must become the blueprint for climate-proofed supply chains that protect both people and product for the long haul.