Minister of State for Finance Omar Ayub Khan has said that government is determined for the uplift of rural areas to bring a green revolution in the country. He was addressing at the inaugural session of a workshop titled "Agriculture growth and the determinants of rural income poverty in Pakistan," which was jointly organised by the Department for International Development (DFID), Pakistan and Asian Development Bank (ADB) here at a local hotel.
In this conference, the experts from different government institutes and donors agencies presented their papers and pointed out bottlenecks, and also suggested measures for the development of agriculture sector.
Omar Ayub highlighted the government steps for the development of rural areas where 65 percent of the population was living and associated with the agriculture production.
He said that agriculture sector at present was contributing only 23 percent to the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) which needed enhancement through revolutionary steps.
Giving details of the government measures, he said the loans would be enhanced to the farmers and private banks would be involved to give loans to the farmers, adding now no bank could take action against a poor farmer if he couldn't return his loan.
Omar said the government would soon announce construction of new dams and increase the capacity of the existing ones and lining of the waterways.
The government was trying to create consensus for the construction of large dams and the project for the lining of watercourses was under way at a rapid pace, adding that in the next five years all such courses would be lined.
Omar Ayub said it would minimise water losses and provide more water for agriculture. New seeds would be introduced to improve yield of crops while 250 veterinary doctors to be inducted to provide free medical treatment to the animals, he added.
The government had decided to start a crash programme for technical and vocational training to impart necessary skills to the unskilled people, he said.
He said the number of skilled manpower in the country had grown, while the unskilled were generally unemployed.
Qmar Ayub said that 300,000 people would be trained annually through the programme, while such skills would be selected, which had a high demand within and outside the country, adding those people would also be given allowances during training.
He said the outreach of Micro credit would be increased to 3.2 million families from the current level of 0.5 million families.
He said the loans worth Rs six billion would be provided for Small and Medium Enterprise (SME) sector to improve industrial production and enhance job opportunities.
Under the adult literacy programme, around 800,000 people in far off areas would be educated through adult education in five years, he said.
Addressing at the occasion, ADB Country Director Syed Masruk Ali Shah said that despite recent good macroeconomic performance, Pakistan continued to have high levels of poverty. Poverty estimates of 2000-01, indicated that around one third of the population lived at or below the poverty line, with poverty being concentrated in rural areas, he added.
The agricultural sector was a major determinant of the overall economic growth and well being in Pakistan, contributing 25 percent of the total GDP; employing 42 percent of the total employed labour force; and accounting for nearly nine percent of the country's export earnings, Masruk said. Thus, high agricultural growth was essential for significant poverty reduction in Pakistan, he added.
However, in addition to the direct impact of agriculture growth on poverty reduction, there was also a much larger indirect effect through the linkages between agriculture and non-farm growth in rural areas, he said.
Masruk said none-farm growth was closely linked with agricultural growth since small farmers spend a large portion of their incremental income on locally produced non-agricultural goods thus generating employment and incomes in the adjoining areas.
The ADB was engaged in a number of directly relevant initiatives in those areas, he said and added the ADB Barani programs worked on income poverty in poorer rain fed areas.
The ADB's Punjab and Balochistan Resource management Projects focussed on creating opportunities for growth and income generation in the private sector, he added.
Masruk said another initiative was ADB's Balochistan Rural Development and Drought Mitigation Project, which aimed to reduce the incidence of rural poverty in Balochistan through economic and social interventions that led to increased rural incomes, create jobs, and reduced resource and environmental degradation.
Projects such as ADB's Agriculture Sector Program included specific reform measure such as strengthening support services in small farmer extension of reduce poverty, he added.
The ADB's Agri business Development Project focused on the provision of business support services to enhance entrepreneurial skills throughout the value chain and accelerate employment generation through agribusiness development, he said.
During the workshop DIFD representative Steve Jones, Sohail J. Malik, Abdul Salem, Faisal Sari, G.M. Arif Presented their papers on the subject. The participant also discussed their papers in open discussion programme.