Unless you belong to Pakistan’s 0.1 percent, it is quite likely the food you ate, the shirt you put on and the shoes you wore were made by inputs sourced from Pakistan’s farming lands. Yet lost in the hype of e-commerce, and start-up culture, few understand that agriculture is still very important to this, or any other country’s economy. Which is perhaps why the growth in national agricultural production has remained weak throughout the last few decades? The fiscal year 2018 was a bit better but given the lack of focus there is no guarantee that the next year will be better than the last.
According to provisional estimates, Pakistan’s agriculture sector grew by 3.81 percent in FY18. That’s remarkably better than the sector’s growth rates of 2.07 percent and 0.15 percent in the preceding two years.
The Pakistan Bureau of Statistics reports that this growth is mainly led by growth in production of three important crops: rice, sugarcane and cotton that are estimated to have grown by 8.7 percent, 7.4 percent, and 11.8 percent respectively. This offset the estimated decline in production in wheat and maize of 4.4 percent and 7.1 percent respectively.
In its just released State of Economy report the central bank reported that area under wheat cultivation declined by 3.5 percent year-on-year due to water shortage in rain-fed as well as irrigated areas, and the delay in harvesting of the sugarcane crop in most of the areas. However, on a side note, PBS’s estimates of growth in cotton production of 11.8 percent are less than the central bank’s estimates of 18 percent. Perhaps one could expect a much higher farming growth when the revised numbers are released.
Livestock sector that produced 59 percent of agricultural output in FY18 grew by 3.7 percent and contributed the most to agricultural GDP growth. The central bank expects the sector to benefit from increased focus of provincial governments on feeding, animal management, and genetics.
But with all the good intentions, there is no guarantee that agricultural growth would continue growing in the ensuing years. The sector suffers from a host of problems: water shortage and efficient water usage, low yields, low productivity, poor quality of seeds and pesticides, lack of financing and insurance, warehousing and transportation, and the whole nine yards.
Central to all these problems is weak governance, which no ‘farming package’ can fix overnight. It requires a concerted effort by the provinces and the center. For instance, even though a national agriculture and food security policy was drafted by Islamabad in 2014, it is still hasn’t been passed, let alone implemented. Agriculture being a provincial domain, the provinces were expected to pass a policy, but save for Khyber Pakhtunkhwa none of the provinces have rolled out their own policies.
Meanwhile coordination lacunas dot the sector. For instance, as Dr Vaqar Ahmed highlights in his recent book, the issues of fertilizer, seed and pesticides remain the responsibility of federal government, the issues of impurities in these farm inputs and their subsidized supply remain in the domain of provincial government.
Or as a 2014 IFPRI paper observes there is widespread confusion over bio-safety laws for seeds as a result of overlapping mandates between the centre and the provinces following devolution. The impact of these regulatory distortions has not been evaluated to date, whereas all of this is compounded by the fact that different provinces have different capacities in their agricultural departments leading to different qualities of crops.
According to Dr. Hafiz Pasha’s analysis almost 60 percent of the industry in Pakistan is agro-based and over 40 percent of transportation and trade is in agricultural commodities. Agriculture sector also helps yield decent foreign exchange earnings: cotton, rice and leather accounted for nearly 11 percent of Pakistan’s exports earnings in FY15. And most importantly, it employs about 44 percent of the labour force. Leaving this sector behind is neither good for the people nor good for the economy.
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