Over the past few years, the Roskin Gem News Report has followed Pakistan’s slow but deliberate push to modernize its gemstone sector. The newest government reports (here, here, and here) suggest those long-discussed ideas are now being translated into national policy.
Taken together, the reports emerging from Pakistan over the past two years tell a more coherent story than any single announcement on its own. This is not a sudden policy experiment. It is a slow-forming effort to turn long-recognized gemstone wealth into documented, value-added exports—and to finally bring an informal sector into the global trade system.
Business Leaders Step In
The message became clear in 2024, when business leaders—not politicians—spoke up about how much value Pakistan was losing through mining wastage and non-value-added rough gemstone exports. ICCI president Ahsan Zafar Bakhtawari noted that roughly 80% of Pakistan’s gemstone exports left the country in raw form, pointing to the lack of in-country cutting, certification, and internationally recognized quality standards. A proposed pilot project in the region was intended as a first step towards addressing these issues.
By 2025, those concerns had moved from chambers of commerce into the Prime Minister’s Office. A special committee on Gemstone Policy, chaired by Special Assistant to the Prime Minister Haroon Akhtar Khan, put hard numbers to the problem. Officials concluded that 30–40% of gemstones are lost due to non-scientific blasting and drilling. By the time cutting and handling are factored in, total wastage approaches 50%.
A Huge Monetary Gap
When the committee turned to exports, the contrast was just as stark. Pakistan’s real gemstone export potential was pegged at over $2 billion annually, yet officially recorded exports stood at just $5–7 million—less than half of one percent of that figure. This gap, officials noted, is largely the result of undocumented trade and the continued export of gemstones in rough form.
The committee’s language was unusually candid. Modern mining technology, Khan noted, could “substantially enhance both gemstone production and exports,” while meaningful value addition could multiply export figures without discovering a single new deposit. The problem, the reports made clear, was not geology—it was infrastructure, standards, and trust.
National Gemstone Policy
That diagnosis set the stage for late-2025 and early-2026, when the government began putting institutional scaffolding around the problem. The Ministry of Industries and Production approved the creation of a new statutory authority to oversee a forthcoming National Gemstones Policy. Its mandate includes coordinating agencies, formalizing the value chain, and aligning quality standards with international benchmarks. Proposals included targeted financing, streamlined export facilitation, and the establishment of a National Warranty Office to handle certification, packaging, and compliance.
From $5 Million to $1 Billion?
Momentum accelerated further in January this year (2026), when Muhammad Shehbaz Sharif granted principled approval to a broader national policy framework. At a high-level review meeting, the Prime Minister expressed concern that Pakistan’s gemstone reserves—estimated now at a staggering $450 billion in situ—remain largely invisible to global markets. He set an ambitious target of $1 billion in annual gemstone exports within five years, ordering the establishment of two Centers of Excellence, international-standard testing laboratories, and a formal certification regime to support what officials described as “Brand Pakistan.”
Across all three phases—2024 industry warnings, 2025 policy diagnosis, and 2026 executive approval—the message is strikingly consistent: stop exporting rough, reduce the waste, replace informal channels with documented trade, and make Pakistan open to international buyers. As one official put it, shifting from smuggling and undocumented exports to formal channels could unlock “billions in much-needed foreign exchange.”
For the global gem trade, this isn’t a story of newly discovered stones. Pakistan’s emeralds, peridot, aquamarine, topaz, and rubies have long been known. What’s new is the attempt—still unproven—to build the mining practices, cutting capacity, certification systems, and regulatory trust needed to keep more of that value at home.
Whether this effort succeeds remains an open question. But viewed over three consecutive years, Pakistan’s gemstone policy push looks less like a headline grab and more like a deliberate attempt to turn geological wealth into a functioning export industry—one reform at a time.
