Agriculture accounts for about 95% of Pakistan's freshwater withdrawals; inefficient agricultural water use was estimate
Source
World Bank — https://documents1.worldbank.org/curated/en/262891632949399367/pdf/World-Bank-Group-Climate-Change-Action-Plan-2021-2025-South-Asia-Roadmap.pdf. Verified in source set / retroactive normalization pending.
What it proves
Pakistan's water crisis is also an efficiency, irrigation, pricing and crop-choice problem.
How to deploy: Use Agriculture accounts for about 95% of Pakistan's freshwater withdrawals; inefficient agricultural water use was estimate (Agriculture accounts for about 95% of Pakistan's freshwater withdrawals; inefficient agricultural water use was estimated to cost about 4% of GDP., None) to support the claim that Pakistan's water crisis is also an efficiency, irrigation, pricing and crop-choice problem.
What it does not prove: The 95% is a share of withdrawals, not of water's economic value or of avoidable waste: any irrigated arid-basin economy will show agriculture dominating withdrawals, so the figure alone identifies no recoverable volume. The ~4% of GDP is a modelled estimate of efficiency losses, not a sum that could be collected by shifting water out of a sector that still supplies food and rural livelihoods.
Memory hook: 95% of water for 23% of GDP → inefficiency alone costs 4% of GDP
Rebuts the claim: "Pakistan's water crisis is fundamentally a storage shortage solvable by building more dams" — 95% of withdrawals already go to a sector where pricing, crop choice and irrigation losses determine the outcome.