Secretary General (Federal) of Businessmen Panel (BMP), Ahmad Jawad has stressed the need for having a long-term strategy for reducing the vulnerability of the farming community and accelerating agriculture development.
"Agriculture reforms, reducing bank interest rate and credit availability to micro, small and medium enterprises will take Pakistan's economic growth to optimum level," he observed.
He further said, "We need to look at reforms in agriculture sector to improve productivity and change the type of agricultural produce we make. We do very little increase value added products," he said. However, he highlighted that farm loan waivers are not a sustainable solution but only temporary patch work to ease farmers' distress. It only gives immediate relief."
As the performance of agriculture during 2018-19 remained subdued as the sector grew by 0.85%, which is much lower than the target of 3.8% set at the beginning of the year.
Over the last decade, the performance of agriculture sector has fallen short of the desirable level, mainly because of stagnant productivity of all important crops.
"Crop area of the five traditional crops has largely remained unchanged. Climate change also poses a serious challenge to Pakistan's agriculture and threatens country's water availability and food security," Jawad maintained.
He further said that public and private sectors should come together to facilitate the adoption of efficient agriculture extension system for a robust growth.
He highlighted the need for a focused and strategical designed policy reforms that would increase the outreach for extension agents to large number of agriculture population.
Although Public Private Partnership (PPP) models do exist in agri extension, he opined that PPP mode can still be explored to its full potential. There is a major gap in the availability of the extension agents for the farmers. It is here by advised that the private sector can come forward and plug in the gap.
He stressed the need to use technology and tools with agro-eco region-based land use and weather-based agro Met advisory services to help farmers and reduce weather-related losses.
The BMP leader further said that the government should cut interest rates and adopt consistent policies for the export of agricultural related produce to enable Pakistani exporters to take advantage of the current US-China trade war.