When Prime Minister Shaukat Aziz, while chairing a meeting on November 11 to review the wheat and cotton situation in the country, decided to import another 0.5 million tons of wheat an important objective was building a strategic reserve and stabilising its prices in the local market. Coming amid a persisting crisis aggravated by the previous year's lower output, understandable should be his urge for effective measures to ensure sufficient availability and affordable prices of the grain which is the basic ingredient of the food people in this country live on.
With renewed emphasis now sought to be placed on more storage facilities, the Prime Minister appears to have taken due note of the complacency in the implementation of a programme conceived a couple of years ago.
This, indeed, has reference to the approval the federal cabinet had accorded to the package of Corporate Agriculture Farming, in June 2002, thereby, setting the pace for translating a revolutionary concept into reality.
Mention, in this regard, may be made of the exemption from duty and sales tax then allowed on the import of machinery and equipment for the newly conceived farming system.
Among other significant features of the programme was restriction of corporate farming to the firms incorporated in Pakistan under the Companies Ordinance 1984. Notably, the programme was not confined to large-scale, mechanised cultivation alone, but also covered varied post-harvest activities, with a marked emphasis on expansion of the too deficient storage facilities, so as to help improve the prospects of value-addition to both cash and food crops.
This should leave little to doubt about the emphasis laid on setting up new silos, the glaring lack of which had continued to add to the predicament of the agricultural sector in its entirety. But the implementation of the plan not only remained beset by problems in the process of its finalisation, mostly through the traditional bottlenecks, and also later encountered delays in the completion of the storage part of the plan with numerous alternatives coming from different interested quarters.
It will be recalled that having persistently stressed the need of imaginative and scientific development of agriculture, this newspaper had advocated corporatisation way back in the turbulent 1970s.
Essentially, our plea was based on the idea of putting the dynamism of the private enterprise to good use for exploiting the country's tremendous farming potential.
Ironically, the apathy of the then rulers to that idea could be attributed partly to the long obsession of the early planners' with hasty industrialisation and partly to their feudal outlook.
Their successors continued to toy with all sorts of egotistic ideas of revolutionising the economy from variously flawed indulgence in industrial development, thereby gradually sapping the vitality of agriculture, as also exacerbating the resulting problems arising from their failure to consolidate whatever gains accrued from haphazard industrial scheme of things.
It will thus be seen that it took over 30 years, punctuated by a great deal of frustration, to identify corporate farming as the right pursuit suited to the Pakistan economy. More to it, providentially, it came about with the launch of a brave, objectively conceived exercise to retrieve the economy from the rock bottom in 1999.
It was precisely then that the need of corporate farming struck the imagination of the Musharraf government, with the incumbent Prime Minister playing a key role in it.
The underlying idea behind the big shift was to put to good use the vast tracts of government land lying vacant in the vicinity of railway lines and around seaport and airports through lease arrangements with prospective investors from both inside and outside the country.
As for the present quandary, it will be in the fitness of things, among other efforts, to expeditiously proceed with the implementation of the belated scheme of building widespread storage facilities, with a marked emphasis on wheat.
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