Senate Standing Committee on Food, Agriculture and Livestock has stressed the need for faster prosecution of the cases against the people and companies involved in the business of adulterated pesticides and fertilisers. It also instructed the authorities concerned to ensure timely availability of fertilisers to farmers in the cotton and wheat growing areas of Punjab.
These instructions were issued at a meeting of the standing committee held here today with Senator Muhammad Amjad Abbas in the Chair. The agenda of the meeting was to discuss the statue of pesticide and fertiliser adulteration and the availability of fertilisers to the farmers in Punjab.
Secretary Agriculture Punjab, Javed Iqbal Awan also given a presentation to the standing committee about campaign lunched by the province against adulteration in pesticides, actions taken and its impact. While giving recommendations, he proposed an office of Plant Protection Department to be established at Lahore which will lead to improve in quality and timely availability of pesticides.
For effective control and check on adulteration in pesticides, he proposed that power of formation of rules may be delegated to provinces as per section 30 of Agricultural Pesticides Ordinance 1971 amended in 1997. He also proposed that Federal Government might allocate funds for establishment of pesticide testing laboratories at provincial headquarters, which may be used as reference laboratories for pesticide testing.
According to the sources the members of meeting were unanimously that the current fertilisers crisis was self created by some dealers and manufacturers while government had also taken late decision of fertilisers import.
On pesticide issue, the chair with the suggestions of the participants proposed to hire services of legal experts at district or tehsil levels, which could assist the Punjab agriculture department in ensuring exemplary punishments to the people involved in the national crime of making spurious and fake pesticides. The participants of the meeting were of the view that sales of spurious and fake pesticide was a heinous crime as it hit the agricultural economy in three ways, first by directly affecting the farmers as use of spurious drugs could not control pests, economic burden and reducing national productivity.
The meeting informed that there are 1.3 million urea bags needed in D G Khan division while there is no urea available in the division. Similarly, Senator Raza Mohammad Raza, Dr Abdul Malik representing Balochistan had pointed out that they are also facing urea shortage. They informed wheat has been sowed at 5000 acre area in command area of Merani Dam but now the farmers have been searching urea for their crop.