LAHORE: Growers have urged the need for setting up agriculture advisory committees (AAC) from tehsil to division level taking all the stakeholders on board which should be kept informed about the status of utilization of funds allocated for agricultural development on quarterly/annual basis to ensure transparency in usage of these funds.
It is also proposed that a representative body of farmers should be working in collaboration with the agriculture department, having role in making policies and educating farmers about funds and its utilization. Proposals emerged at a discussion arranged by the Agriculture Republic, a think tank constituted to discuss the issues faced by the agriculture and suggesting remedies. Foud Bajwa and Aamir Hayat Bhandara, founders of the platform moderated the discussion on farming and improvement of agriculture stakeholder community's accountability in agriculture investments/funds allocated.
The discussants said that large amounts of data are collected and generated by governments to develop and monitor policies and stimulate developments. By publishing this data as open data and stimulating the use and uptake by the sector, farmers can be empowered, optimizing agricultural practices, stimulating rural finance, facilitating the agriculture value chain, enforcing policies, and promoting government transparency and efficiency.
Data sharing portal should be developed allowing anonymous data to be extracted by any researcher free of cost allowing data to be sliced and diced in several different ways as demanded by the researchers.
The Gazette publishes all expenditures incurred by a particular department in a year with itemized expenditures of major heads. If utilization is low for any particular head, the public can direct a query to the concerned dept about why the utilization was low. Citizen's portal can also be utilized to raise such concerns. This will help create an environment of accountability, transparency and will push departments to ensure value for money while spending taxpayers funds, discussants were of the view.
No amount should be disbursed to land holders rather inputs should be given to them that must be stamped by the government "not for sale". A large number of the small land holders get loan by banks to purchase inputs but they use the sanctioned amounts for their personal use or for other businesses, the speakers observed.
The agriculture department in collaboration with the revenue must have the data of farmers, so if the statistical department can categorize the farmers and forward the data of target farmers group it will be easy to disburse the amount directly to the farmers wallet accounts on their mobile numbers to avoid the hassle of coupons or mechanism like this.
Farmers should be issued credit cards (with a validity until the next crop) and make the input suppliers bound to sell pesticides, fertilizers, seeds, chemicals or other agriculture inputs through those credit cards on POS machines this will ensure the transparency of the subsidy, funds, monitoring demand and supply of inputs, prevent artificial shortages and increase the revenue of the government through documented transactions between the farmers and the input suppliers.
Once any agricultural project/aid is announced, all its expenses/detail should be made public from the very first day. For example, if the government issues a subsidy on rice harvesters, it should not just provide the harvesters but post all the details about the buying price of those harvesters, details of farmers to whom they have been provided, and the next step should be the impact of that subsidy on farmers' income, crop yield, and economic well being. And the main thing is let general people know that this is where we posted the accountability/transparency report/information and this is how you can access it, the discussion added. At the micro-level, where farmers having less than 5 acres are in deprived zones, they need strong reforms for their betterment.
At the department side, there is a need to increase the number of field staff which is directly connected with poor farmers. The average field assistant belongs to 20 to 30 different areas which is a very large figure, and needs to be decentralized at the micro-level. There should be reforms and uniform policy for poor farmers, departments like Agri, revenue department, crops reporting and food department should be strongly connected with each other to get excellent representative samples of poor farmers.
Copyright Business Recorder, 2020