By Muhammad Atif Ismail Multan, Sep 23 (APP):Along the riverine belt stretching nearly 380 kilometers from Chiniot to Head Panjnad, where rows of mango trees once stood as a familiar sign of the region’s agricultural wealth, the devastating floods of 2025 left behind a landscape of destruction and an uncertain production future. The flood-waters not only swept away large numbers of mango trees but also erased …
Mango re-plantation challenge: river Chenab belt struggle to bridge gap
By Muhammad Atif Ismail
Multan, Sep 23 (APP):Along the riverine belt stretching nearly 380 kilometers from Chiniot to Head Panjnad, where rows of mango trees once stood as a familiar sign of the region’s agricultural wealth, the devastating floods of 2025 left behind a landscape of destruction and an uncertain production future.
The flood-waters not only swept away large numbers of mango trees but also erased years of orchard growth, leaving growers with a challenge that cannot be overcome in a single season.
From young saplings to mature, fruit-bearing trees, orchards across the belt suffered extensive damage, creating a long-term gap in the region’s mango-producing capacity that could take several years to bridge.
The loss is measured not only in this season’s fruit but in the future harvests that mature trees would have continued to provide for years.
Progressive mango grower Shahid Hameed Bhutta told APP that the impact of the floods would extend well beyond a single production season because replacing the destroyed orchards and restoring their productive capacity would be a long-term process.
He said a large number of mango trees had been lost across the riverine belt, leaving a huge gap in the region’s productive tree population.
“The loss of mature mango trees cannot be compensated for immediately. New plantations require at least eight years to reach productive age, so the production gap created by the floods would continue for years,” he said.
According to the grower, the destruction of established orchards has affected the mango sector at two levels. On one hand, the immediate availability of fruit has declined, while on the other, the region has lost a substantial number of productive trees that would otherwise have continued contributing to mango production for many years.
The reduced number of productive trees has already contributed to lower mango output, while the shortage of fruit has also affected supplies available for commercial marketing and export.
Shahid Bhutta said the restoration of the mango belt would require extensive replanting over the coming years. However, newly planted trees would not be able to immediately replace the production lost from mature orchards.
He explained that mango trees pass through different stages of growth before reaching commercial production, while the destruction of mature orchards creates a production deficit that cannot be addressed within a single season.
Laique Sheikhana, another well-known grower in the area, echoed the same concern.
He said the floods had not only damaged this year’s crop but also caused a setback to the belt’s production capacity for years to come, since a newly planted mango tree typically takes several years before bearing fruit on a commercial scale.
Sheikhana said growers now face a stretch of lean seasons even as they invest in replanting, with income from their orchards reduced just when they need money to buy new plants. He said, “The challenge is not simply planting new trees; it is rebuilding the productive capacity of the orchards that has been lost.”
The situation has turned orchard rehabilitation into a long-term challenge for mango growers in the flood-affected riverine areas. Farmers are now focusing on establishing new plantations, but the benefits of these efforts will become visible gradually as the trees mature.
Malik Arif Kalrou, from Nawabpur village, who has already begun replanting part of his own orchard, described the same picture from the ground. He said many growers in the belt had lost entire stands of trees and were now competing for a limited supply of healthy saplings just as the new planting season had begun.
Kalrou said he had gone ahead and planted new trees despite the shortage, but acknowledged that growers with larger holdings were struggling to source enough saplings to replace what they had lost.
He added that the flood damage had also highlighted the wider vulnerability of riverine mango orchards to extreme weather events.
The destruction of established trees represents not only the loss of the current crop but also the loss of future harvests that those trees could have produced over many years, he added.
For mango-growing communities along the Chiniot-to-Head Panjnad belt, the recovery process therefore involves rebuilding the tree population as well as restoring annual fruit production.
Growers believe that sustained plantation and proper orchard management will be essential to gradually bridge the production deficit created by the 2025 floods, he observed.
The full impact of the disaster would consequently remain visible in the mango sector for several years, as newly planted trees take time to replace the productive capacity of mature orchards destroyed by the floods, Arif hinted.
The challenge facing the region is thus not merely recovery from a lost mango season but the rebuilding of an entire productive tree base that forms the foundation of the area’s future mango economy.
