Current agricultural trajectory of Pakistan
PAKISTAN is a country with a primarily agrarian economy. The agricultural sector contributes to over 22 per cent of the country’s GDP and engages almost 38% of the total workforce. Agriculture is the primary sector of Pakistan’s economy that also includes fishing and mining and thus agriculture remains the backbone for Pakistan’s socio-economic development, employment, trade and food security.
Having an agricultural background myself, I have always put a keen interest in it and this year’s wheat harvest that came out in surplus across the country is a good omen. Despite last year’s heavy flooding, issues with soil cultivation, high inflation and poor economic conditions, a bumper wheat crop will surely lessen the miseries of Pakistan. We were able to harvest more than 50 maunds per acre of wheat and news has been similar from other areas as well. For a country facing rampant population growth and high food inflation, bumper crops are an equally important relief for farmers and consumers.
If we talk about the overall condition of agriculture in Pakistan, despite a significant decrease in its share in development time and resource allocations, agriculture nonetheless remains a mainstream economic activity with strategic relevance for socio-economic development of the country. Over time, Pakistan has witnessed an alarming rise in the population explosion it is facing which has added stress on the overall food demand. To keep pace with the situation, the government with all possible measures, looks forward to encouraging the farmers in Pakistan to produce enough to meet the domestic demands and export their surplus. Improving the food and activities sector has received enough attention of the state, the private sector and donors to the economy. Pakistan’s agricultural trajectory has been uneven. In order to accommodate the country’s transforming needs, farmers across the country have diversified their croplands and have adapted improved agro technologies. Nonetheless, the farming and irrigation infrastructures lag far behind, thereby causing harm to poorly adapted agro-climatic conditions and exposure to hot and dry weather conditions disastrous for the country’s production capacities.
Pakistan’s agricultural sector has yet to make any significant progress despite facing numerous technical, institutional and policy challenges. Remarkably, the foundations of Pakistan’s agro-based economy were inscribed in the initial years of the country, with Green Revolution technologies providing unprecedented awesomeness to agricultural production, causing Punjab and KPK to become food baskets for a newly-independent country. With continued neglect and myriad public policy shifts overtime, however, research and private sector investment in the sector and the public extension and irrigation systems, have dwindled and showed pretty poor impact results.
The primary challenges currently facing the agricultural sector in Pakistan include water scarcity combined with too many mouths to feed, lack of crop diversity, ineffective land management, traditional farming practices and processes, insufficient marketing tools, uneven access to credit facilities, poorly adapted crop-related inputs and low literacy among populations of farming communities. The prevalent utilisation of traditional resources results in synthetic inputs and pesticides further exacerbate the situation by prompting excessive environmental and health effects attributed to their use.
Pakistan’s government seems only sporadically engaged with public policies aimed at boosting the agricultural sector. In addition to limited resources being allocated to research and extension activities, at the central, provincial and local levels, coordination efforts haven’t been successful in enabling farmers’ access to subsidized inputs and other essential services needed to enhance production and marketing.
The attempts realized so far have included a managed electricity and fertilizer price decision aimed at sustainably strengthening the marginal farmers. Additionally, subsidies for loan are offered to increase access to credit facilities, though coordinating institutional arrangements continue affecting real efficacy in the quick disbursement to the farmers with various agro-climatic regions. Nonetheless, this policy response has not still shown any major contribution to the agricultural development process and often vague and contentious pieces of the main document are purely ignored.
The modern agricultural practices adapted around the world are based primarily on agronomic principles well suited to site-specific characteristics that determine maximum yield quality/productivity under several stress factors and irrigation systems . The bulk of the farmers in Pakistan, however, continues with age-old farming practices, rooted in traditional beliefs, low absenteeism forces and/or poor economic conditions that often combine to accept or even accentuate the negative implications for farming and agro-based economies. Notably also, there are no serious attempts to introduce efficiently adapted high-yielding breeding crops without proper administration plans aggravating the overall anti-progress of the agriculture industry quotient in the country.
The panacea for improving the agricultural industry in Pakistan is an efficient and cohesive public-private partnership (PPP) module. Private sector participation and effective policies will help farmers access succour value chain link facilitation involves increased integration involving agriculture’s Downstream interface in Pak economy. Potential pilots should first be emanating from robust coordinating basis shared by the public and private sector, rural-based developing organization, agrarian cooperative societies, research and extensions, land rents and property management firms, quality systems’ certification/certificates organizations, budgetary institutions and debt-finance institutions in order to form comprehensive organizing systems directed at promoting Ethiopia-style small holder-leasehold business credit unions, to sway varied cooperative structures and acceleration policies.
—The writer is contributing columnist.
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