Speakers at a seminar titled ‘The role of AgriTech – unlocking opportunities and overcoming barriers’ in Hyderabad the other day once outlined all the problems in the agriculture sector that could be overcome by incorporating modern technologies and innovative practices.
This was not the first time stakeholders and experts highlighted these issues, of course, especially threats to food security due to shrinking land resources and water scarcity, etc. And while the government is aware of these issues and the agriculture ministry often invites specialists to offer solutions, it has still not come round to embracing the most workable solution in practice on the ground.
In fact, one of the speakers rightly pointed out that Pakistan could never even come close to meeting the UN’s Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) regarding nutrition and sustainable agriculture precisely because of its reluctance to adopting modern technology.
The FAO (Food and Agriculture Organisation) representative went so far as to say that it fears widespread hunger and deep economic crises in countries like Pakistan, which continue to employ medieval agri practices despite a very visible decline in productivity.
FAO’s work with provincial institutions, civil society and research institutions often hits a brick wall because there is no effective official follow up to all the academic work that identifies problems and offers solutions.
Over the last couple of decades Pakistan has dropped from a water surplus country to a dangerously water deficient one – in around the same time it has changed from an agri-surplus exporter to a net importer, which includes staple food – yet we’ve still not come round to adopting modern practices like drip irrigation and continue to rely on stone age technology.
Farmers also do not have access to good quality seeds, which compromises crop quality and in case of cotton, forces import of an essential commodity that feeds the country’s premier export industry; hurting the trade balance as well when the country faces no bigger challenge than chronically low reserves and the threat of sovereign default itself.
Husain Ebrahim Kamal,
Karachi
Copyright Business Recorder, 2023
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