The developed countries will not let the developing countries do their own thing and will keep on adding issues to world stability that will force the developing countries to consider the options by themselves. It serves two purposes, the first is that it keeps the developing country from taking their rightful place in the comity of nations and secondly, it wipes the guilt of the developed countries of centuries of exploitation of the developing countries.
Those centuries of guilt-formation are further perverted by the kinds of action that require a sturdier activity. The action, over the years, is such that the developing world has suffered because of these terror-like fears that are spread purposely. Now, it is that the risk to farming is real. Well, if it is real then the people responsible are the ones that are located in the developed world and they had better pay up and repair the system-the world system.
No matter who says what, the conveniences of the west will not allow the repair work to be undertaken because their economies are linked with that kind of system that destroys human nature and not the planet. Just explain the activity of the centuries of perverted exploitation that has taken place on this planet and try and repair the human element first.
Then others things come in to this. The Consultative Group on Agriculture Research [CGAR] is another such institution. It was not meant to remove hunger, but to set up a system that, over the years, has sucked the blood of the poor and at the expense of the poor countries. Just consider the various reports that are made about the developing countries and stated ad-lib by the electronic media compêrs and participants.
Opinions all round and nothing else; opinions being aired as the last word on any and everything and messing up every aspect of life in Pakistan, irrespective of whether these are true words and whether integrity has been vouchsafed. These that have been are the ones and the young, if they are ever brought on the electronic media, expose the weaknesses of the education system.
Those days, when lecturers and teachers were available to the students free of cost, have ended. Follow the rules laid down by the World Bank and see what can happen to you. The education sector has suffered from privatisation, for the kind of education that is being provided has no basis and none for the fees charged. I can give you umpteen examples of what has been done to us. Primary education has always been the responsibility of the state and no one understood this better than Shaheed ZAB. But I have digressed.
Planet-correction is not possible through money allocations [the recent meeting of the EU for that is a non-starter]. What is required is that the developed country not put on the back burner, there own policies for the removal of carbon and other elements.
The problem is that their own population, (employment is linked with this) which is running high at the moment because of self-perpetuated problems caused by unintended, but intentional errors, caused by selfish ends at whatever cost to the rest of the world. The worst sufferers are the small farmers in Pakistan, for they have not been energised to handle such situations.
They have been taken out of the multiple-cropping systems that were their forte by the promise and the goodness of the future. That has not happened and we now know that the green revolution brought with it multiple problems and these are too complex to narrate here. Suffice it to say that the productivity of the land has suffered and the factor costs have become so exorbitant that the world is no longer at peace with its food security aspects.
And who gave any one the option that wheat constituted food security. In our own country the staple food can be maize, millet and sorghum, not to speak of a mixture of these. Despite marginal lands and knowledge, not as advanced as at the moment, the farmers were relatively well-off, despite their being kept at the subsistence level by the colonialists. Their bio-diversity enabled them to pull through the stressful times.
That bio-diversity has been lost, thanks to the interference of the research system that has been imposed on the third world. It is now very difficult to bring in farm diversity for that experience is difficult to achieve and easy to lose. Farmers have now lost that ability and can no longer go back to those days when they managed their own affairs.
Pakistan was in the peasant farming system and it had a lot going for the poor and small farmer. To meet the harsh environments in, for instance Balochistan, poly-culture or complex agriculture needs to be practised. That would lead to managing the harsh growing conditions in a sustainable manner. Chemical agriculture has its great drawbacks the least of which is not the price of these inputs, by virtue of which the trading company, the East India Company, seems to be back.
Factor costs have no relationship with the productivity element except that these are used for putting the fear of God in the poor, resource-poor farmer. By having multiple cropping systems, the farmer achieves a number of goals. There is greater yield stability and the farmer enjoys his biodiversity systems.
There is another advantage that will be driven home if there is drought in the current season. For if he was practising the lessons that his forefathers were able to understand, he would not have suffered as much as he does now, because the lessons have not been learnt. One does not have to be a sage.
How will resiliency come the farmer's way? How will he be self sustaining? What will be the basis of giving some pride back to him? The unanswered questions are many. The answers have been lost in the tyranny of the modern-knowledge system. The number of technologies that any farmer can apply to local requirements is mind - boggling.
In a recent experiment is Sindh, local farmers developed a technology that saved Pakistan's cotton experiment, with the locals coming in showing us how the strategy actually worked. The raised and ridges plantation is expected to work for the local crop and be an asset to the system, we have made life difficult for our own country.
So what is to be done is without much cost and if any, it is a simple way to calculating the variations and ultimately different for different regions. More is not necessarily reasonable or excellent. These two adjectives are in the realm of the nation's imagination as the last word in agriculture technology. The farmer's approach is to pull something out of the ordinary and then try and fetch a way out of it.
They have been misinformed and will continue to bomb blast, thanks to misleading values and what kind of work; can come out of the fresh intervention? There are a number of painful implications. The modern concept of cutting and having very large fields, without any trees, is to disappear because of climate change. By sticking to international research, we have foreclosed our options.