EDITORIAL: Prime Minister Imran Khan is right that if incomes of famers are doubled, and they invest the additional proceeds in agriculture, then their output will increase, prices will decrease, and Pakistan as a whole will benefit. And perhaps the biggest advantage will be that we will no longer have to spend billions of dollars on food import, which will do the current account a world of good and give everybody in the finance ministry and the central bank less to worry about. The Kissan Card initiative, which will help farmers get direct subsidies on various agricultural inputs, will also go a long way in making this vision come to life. Steps are already being taken to remove predatory middlemen from the picture, and support prices are being raised, so if everything stays on track the farmers ought to have a little less to complain about in times to come.
The PM is also right to put agriculture so high on his government's priority list. The sector has the highest percentage of people and families in the country associated with it, after all, even at a time when the overwhelming global trend is one of rural-urban migration. Yet there's only so much of it that can be allowed to happen unchecked, because if such migration is only for economic reasons then urban centres run the risk of becoming slums. Therefore, it is very much in the interest of cities to have a healthy migration of resources and money from towns to the periphery at the same time. That way a healthy balance can be maintained and the nation's food basket can be better protected as well.
Food autarky is a very important subject and it is already a very big concern that a naturally agriculturally endowed country like Pakistan has to spend top dollar to buy food for its people. Even when we had a record wheat crop last year, as the PM very rightly reminded everybody at the Kissan Convention, the country still had to import about four million tonnes of the commodity. And while our extraordinary population growth rate is also a big part of the bigger problem, there can be no denying that the agriculture sector has been very badly handled over the last few years. That, in turn, has delivered us the double whammy of a decreasing food crop as well as a struggling export industry, which is principally agri-based.
Therefore such a serious change of track is very welcome. Upgrading agriculture will enable us to save on the food bill and bring more export-driven foreign exchange into the country. Right now we're barely managing to stay above water only because remittances broke records and remained resilient throughout the last fiscal. But you can't rely on such circumstantial surprises for too long and also hope to achieve economic self-sufficiency and sustained growth; because that is what it is going to take to alleviate poverty in this country, something the prime minister says is now his administration's mission. And if the cure to a lot of our ills is reviving agriculture, which was and is still supposed to be the economy's backbone, then it should indeed get the government's most serious attention.
These are times of monumental change for Pakistan. The economy is in just the right position for the right kind of push, the benefits of the CPEC (China Pakistan Economic Corridor) are about to start coming, and the government seems determined to shape up agriculture and related export industries. Yet these are also times of great challenges for the country. Afghanistan's breakdown has raised a very serious red flag in Pakistan. And if the security situation worsens then the economy will surely be pushed back down to its knees. So, welcome as the government's newfound sense of direction is, it must still be remembered that it is going to take a lot more than just marking the right box in the policy section to get the ball rolling, and keep it rolling, on the ground.
Copyright Business Recorder, 2021
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