Kazim Saeed, CEO, Pakistan Agricultural Coalition

Kazim Saeed spent 25 years advising developing country governments on energy policy for the World Bank before turning his attention to Pakistan’s agricultural sector, where he co-founded the Pakistan Agricultural Coalition, a non-profit backed by 20 of the country’s largest business groups. He brought to agriculture the same instinct he brought to energy: that the private sector, given the right models and incentives, can move faster and at a greater scale than aid programmes alone. His writing and advocacy have been consistent on one point that Pakistan’s farmers are not the problem. They are the country’s most climate-literate citizens, the people who have been feeling the shift in weather patterns for a decade longer than anyone in Islamabad or Karachi, and they deserve not just awareness campaigns but concrete instruments like crop insurance, better seed, and working markets. Saeed has appeared at previous Breathe Pakistan conferences and written extensively on how climate change is already reshaping Pakistan’s food economy, from cotton failures in the south to wheat yield losses triggered by a heatwave that erased spring entirely.