The agriculture sector has performed poorly in the financial year 2007-08, growing at 1.5 percent against the target of 4.8 percent. "The poor performance of agriculture can be attributed to an equally poor performance of major crops and forestry, registering negative growth of 3.0 percent and 8.5 percent, respectively," official sources said.
Livestock, minor crops and fishing have been the saving grace as these sectors have performed reasonably well to compensate the performance of major crops and forestry to arrive at 1.5 percent growth in agriculture this year. Major crops, accounting for 34 percent of agriculture and 7.1 percent of GDP, suffered on account of poor sowing of wheat and cotton and less than satisfactory performance of rice crop.
Sugarcane and maize being other two major crops performed impressively in 2007-08, sources added. The cotton crop suffered for a variety of reasons including heavy rainfall in May 2007 causing poor germination in Punjab, high temperature during August and September 2007 causing more shedding of fruit parts and pest attack, especially dangerous mealy bug infestation. Consequently, cotton production declined to 11.7 million bales this year from 12.9 million bales last year, thus registering a negative growth of 9.3 percent, sources added.
The wheat crop was adversely affected by the shortage of irrigation water by 23.3 percent over normal supplies during Rabi and inordinate spike in prices of DAP fertiliser. Accordingly, production of wheat declined to 21.7 million tons from 23.3 million tons last year, registering a decline of 6.6 percent. However, the two other major crops performed better with sugarcane recording highest ever production level of 63.9 million tons, 16.8 percent higher than last year.
The production of rice witnessed a modest growth of 2.3 percent and stood at 5.6 million tons. Minor crops accounting for 12 percent in agriculture value added posted a growth of 4.9 percent against the negative growth of 1.3 percent last year.
The performance of livestock accounting for 52.2 percent of agricultural value added was satisfactory at 3.8 percent. The performance of fisheries has been impressive as it grew by 11 percent in 2007-08 because inland fish catch has increased by 11.1 percent while the output of marine fishing grew by 11.5 percent during 2007-08.
Forestry followed the traditional negative growth pattern for the fifth year in a row. This small sector with only one percent stake in the overall value-addition in agriculture, registered negative growth of 8.5 percent in 2007-08 as the turnout of production of timber and firewood during the year declined by 9.3 percent, the sources added.
Comments
Comments are closed.