Ministry of Food, Agriculture and Livestock (Minfal) has admitted that the agriculture sector is facing a number of challenges, which included narrowing yield gaps, improving technical know-how, undertaking effective market reforms and strengthening research agenda on priority basis.
Collaboration between government and private sector would be most beneficial to meet the challenges, sources told Business Recorder here on Tuesday. They said the key challenges being faced by the agriculture sector are stagnating yields, widening yield gaps between progressive and average farmers, increasing water scarcity and inefficient use of available water and degradation of land by water logging and salinity.
Inefficient transfer of technology to the farmer, poor quality of inputs and inefficient research and extension services are the other challenges which cause low productivity of the crops, they maintained.
They said the farmers cannot get the required yields due to poor rural infrastructure, frequent insects and pests attacks, high incidence of crop and livestock diseases, lack of capital and financial resources and lack of international competitiveness of some agricultural commodities grown by the farmers.
They said the government has prepared a poverty reduction strategy paper for achieving pro-poor growth with special emphasis to modernise agricultural sector. They said the government is also committed to improve rural and agricultural infrastructure by implementing various agricultural programmes to generate high and sustainable growth.
The government's development strategy is aimed at increasing farm income by enhancing agricultural production for meeting needs of food for the growing population. The government is trying its level best to improve rural infrastructure, expanding agricultural support services/facilities to improve productivity and competition in global marketing.
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