Region 
 

Region

Culture of Agriculture

As a predominantly agricultural country, Pakistan needs to relook
at this important sector and reap the potential benefits.

By Dr M Ali Hamza | January 2021

Culture-of-Agriculture

Pakistan is an agrarian country and we have been told this since our childhood. To an extent this is correct because agriculture employs about 42.3% of the nation’s labour force and contributes around 22.04% to the GDP of Pakistan. This is more than the share of industry, which is 18.34%. Agriculture is Pakistan’s largest source of foreign exchange earnings as it is among the top 10 largest producers and suppliers of sugarcane, wheat, rice, cotton, onions, date palm, kinnows, mangos, apricots, etc.

Livestock is a subsector of agriculture and contributes about half of the value of the agriculture sector, amounting to nearly 11% of Pakistan’s GDP, which is more than the crop sector. Thus agriculture in Pakistan has great potential to play its role in economic re-construction and social prosperity through income generation, economic uplift, employment, rural development, securing food supply, fetching agro-raw materials, etc. Have these potentials been realized? Is Pakistan extracting full advantage of its agro-capacity?

The answer is a simple no. Let us understand the problems briefly:

a) There is a gradual decrease of soil fertility in Pakistan and yet no mechanism is introduced to eradicate soil erosion and restore soil energy. Agricultural experts believe that low soil fertility is among the major causes of low crop yield.

b) The traditional irrigation practices and archaic methods that waste 50-60% water are still in practice.

A UNDP (United Nations Development Programme) 2016 report says that the major threat Pakistan faces today is not terrorism but water scarcity and therefore the Pakistan Council of Research in Water Resources (PCRWR) has warned that the country may run dry by 2025.

The reality is that per capita annual water availability in Pakistan has dropped to 1,017 cubic metres from 5300 in 1947. Many parts of the world have introduced drip irrigation systems that save water and provide the proper quantity of water as per the need of the crop. We need to remind ourselves that food security is directly related to water security.

c) Waterlogging and salinity is increasing day by day and most of our cultivated lands have become victims of these two dangerous diseases. Imagine that every year, salinity alone is turning about 100,000 acres of arable land into marshes and salt lands.

d) Poor capacity building networks for farmers keep them alienated to modern cultivating and harvesting technologies such as using genetically improved seeds, controlling various diseases, pests, etc.

e) Agricultural education for less literate farmers through result-oriented learning programs is heavily missing.

f) Our farmers cannot get just prices for their produce due to poor direct marketing facilities for their products. The mafia of middlemen between the producers and consumers take away the main share. Consequently the farmers don’t receive the full financial advantage of their efforts and start expecting less benefits which ultimately demotivates them to grow more.

g) Imbalance in land ownership in Pakistan. About 50.8% of the land is rural which is less than 15% of total land. On the other hand, 5% of the country’s population owns almost 64% of the farmland. Such concentration of ownership is thought to be less productive.

According to the World Bank, “most empirical evidence indicates that land productivity on large farms in Pakistan is lower than that of small farms, holding other factors constant.” The same report also elaborates that sharecropper productivity is also lower; around 20% less than landowner productivity, because there is less incentive for sharecroppers’ own labour inputs. In an effort to redistribute land to peasants and the landless, Ayub Khan’s government passed a major piece of legislation that included a ceiling on individual holdings - a maximum 500 acres of irrigated and 1,000 acres of un-irrigated land ownership for an individual.

Later Zulfikar Ali Bhutto kept the spirit with slight changes in 1972 and 1977, until the reforms were struck down by the Shariat Appellate Bench of the Supreme Court, declaring land reforms in Pakistan as un-Islamic (Qazalbash Waqf V. Chief Land Commissioner).

How could a religion that teaches selflessness, social generosity and distributive justice, support feudalism? It was not Islam but rather a mindset of some.

The present government is occupied in clearing debts, balancing trade deficits, putting the economy on the right track, industrialization, fighting price hikes and reacting to the propaganda of the Opposition. Sadly, its dearth of efforts to upgrade agriculture is evident. The government itself does not realize the vitality of responding to the matter and does not seem to have a plan to tackle the complexity involved. Moreover, it appears helpless in the hands of electables and parties in alliance, who are beneficiaries of the middleman mafia and there is no ceiling on land-holdings, illiteracy of farmers, etc.

Time is slipping fast, but the government can still do some reverse engineering for agri-equipment and urge applied research to make a social impact instead of basic curiosity research. It can identify and incentivize people of action in universities and the farmers’ community, insist and follow the relevant departments to frame and execute market mechanisms that discourage middlemen, fund impactful capacity programs connected with interest-free loans for small farmers, promote the idea of agricultural industrialization, sponsor love for agricultural science, foster diplomatic ties with agriculturally progressive states and do the needed legislation.

What is needed is re-arrangement of the culture of agriculture.

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