A year of halted Pakistan-Afghanistan trade leaves exporters counting $2.5bn in losses and taking costly detours
PESHAWAR: A year has passed since trade between Pakistan and Afghanistan stopped, and the arithmetic of that silence is now being counted in Peshawar’s factories and truck depots. Trade was suspended in October 2025 after deadly clashes along the border. Business groups put the trade lost since then at more than $2.5 billion; figures cited by the Khyber Chamber of Commerce break that down into roughly $1.64 billion in lost exports and $817 million in lost imports.
From 80 per cent to five
Exporter Mansour Ilahi used to send rice, meat, citrus fruit and potatoes to Afghanistan and onward to Central Asia. Those markets once provided 80 per cent of his revenue. Today they provide five per cent. “It was shocking not for me but for everybody,” he says. Alternative routes exist, but they are longer, dearer, and every extra day on the road comes out of the trader’s own pocket.
Medicines with nowhere to go
At a pharmaceutical factory in Hayatabad, the production lines still run — but around 70 per cent of the medicines packed there were meant for Afghanistan and Central Asia. Pharmaceuticals are Pakistan’s biggest export item to Afghanistan, which is why this industry felt the closure first and hardest. The company is trying to sell more at home, but domestic demand is no simple substitute for the orders that used to cross the border. The factory sits just 60 kilometres from the Torkham crossing. Right now, those 60 kilometres may as well be an ocean.
The bill keeps widening
A truck depot that once dispatched 40 to 50 loaded trucks a day now dispatches none. Transporters, customs clearing agents, labourers and the small businesses around them have all taken their share of the hit, and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa has lost an estimated Rs7.27 billion in cess revenue on top. Traders have raised the same demand at every forum for a year: keep trade separate from politics. A year on, the question they started with is still the only one that matters — when does the road reopen?
