Businessmen Panel (Federal) secretary general Ahmad Jawad has proposed that horticulture sector should be given the status of a full-fledged industry. He said we are lobbying with the government to prepare a policy accordingly and provide incentives in its yearly budgets.
Jawad who was former chairman of FPCCI Standing Committee on Agriculture Produce also recommended that cotton production target should be set at 25 million bales by 2023. As different causes for the stagnation in cotton harvest, which included the use of old first generation rather than fourth generation BT technology, absence of better quality seeds, lack of solution to the cotton leaf curl virus, low processing quality at ginning factories and high contamination levels in the produce. These reasons brought down profits for cotton farmers and slashed by 20 percent the area planted with the crop from 2004 to 2016 which needs to be addressed now to uplift cotton industry. As previous governments allowed to import cotton on zero percent from India which hurt farmers.
He also elaborated following challenges and Industry role for the uplift of the sector which needs to be taken up in the coming budget 2019-20 and so on till 2023.
challenges:
1 - Small landholding: Since the bulk of farmers have less than 10 acres of land, there is problem in getting the benefits of 'economics of scale.'
2 - Limited access to technology and extension: Farmers still do not have access to better technology. Also, effective dissemination of information from lab to land remains a challenge.
3 - Storage: We need to come a long way in terms of availability and access of agricultural storage facilities for farmers.
4 - Price volatility: The agriculture sector faces the cobweb phenomenon, so there always a need exists to ensure farmers get remunerative prices.
5 - Market integration: Pakistani farmers need to be well connected to the end-consumer. The number of stakeholders across the value chain needs to be reduced. Industry may ask: 1 Better environment for start-ups in food and agri business 2 Greater technological investments in the field of agriculture 3 Simplified leasing norms for setting up processing infrastructure 4 Corporate farming norms to be made more acceptable and balanced for both farmers and corporate 5 Increased involvement of private players for increasing storage infrastructure including CA stores. He said significant focus is needed on agriculture, with a view to improve rural economy and livelihoods. Policies and allocations are needed to ensure good prices for farmers' crops, food and nutritional security and minimum wastage. Risks will need to be reduced via better implementation and monitoring of risk-mitigating policies, Jawad added.
Almost every government has announced incentives and financial packages for the agriculture sector in a bid to ensure food security and win over voters. Agriculture areas remain a huge vote bank for the political parties and the elected landlords (not peasants and farmers) dominate parliamentary affairs, but in Naya Pakistan we will like see concrete measures in the coming annual budget in order to uplift the sector. Jawad said unlike the importance PTI attached to the agriculture sector in its election manifesto, despite some incentives the party largely chose to ignore the sector in the last two mini-budgets of the incumbent government. He said if the government was really giving any importance to the agriculture sector; it would have taken steps to reduce prices of fertilizers at the optimum level, end the role of middleman in agri-marketing and provide significant incentives to the farmers on input costs.
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