Islamabad
Minister for National Food Security and Research Syed Fakhar Imam has said that up-gradation of research system and technological advancement were prerequisite for meeting the emerging chal-lenges of food safety and security across the glob.
Addressing the Pre-Summit United Nations Food Security System Meeting on Pakistan Food Security System and Transformation, Imam said that Pakistan was among the densely populated countries and needed to make swift go ahead in its research and development system to meet with growing food demands.
He said that developed economies of the world adopted modern technologies, upgraded their re-search system and introduced latest solutions to meet their food requirements.
“We in Pakistan are also expanding our research system and collaborating with the universities to involve the youth, which was half of the population to transform local agriculture sector and to make it attractive for them to create entrepreneurship oppor-tunities for them”, he added.
Imam said that Prime Minister was taking keen interest in development of agriculture sector and prosperity of farming communities, adding that special initiatives were also announced to enhance per-acre crop output to ensure availability of food commodities at affordable prices.
Due to the prudent polices of the current gov-ernment, he said that despite global Covid-19 Pan-demic Pakistan had harvested bumper crops of wheat, rice, maize and sugarcane, adding that steps were being taken to promote high value crops to produce imports’ substitutions.
Availability of certified seeds are the major bottleneck in enhancing output of all major and minor crops, he said adding that to address this is-sue, government had introduced track and trace policy to ensure supply of certified seeds for grow-ers.
He said that under this policy about 30 percent requirements of wheat seed were met in first year, adding that the policy would be implemented on rice and cotton to provide certified quality seeds for enhancing per-acre crop output in the country.
He said that the United Nations Summit was the most important in pretext of global pandemic and finding ways and means to overcome the food safety and security challenges.
Speaking on the occasion, Special Assistant to Prime Minister (SAPM) on National Food Security Jamshed Iqbal Cheema reiterated the government’s firm commitment for ensuring availability of per-capita food in the country by transforming local agriculture sector. —APP
