Punjab Agricultural Research Board (PARB) Chief Executive Officer Dr Mubarak Ali has termed the little and inappropriate investment on research, lack of co-ordinated planning, monitoring and evaluation and focus on routine rather than problem-solving research as the major constraints in agricultural research. He was speaking at a meeting of the executive committee of the Farmers Associates Pakistan (FAP), said a spokesperson of the Board on Monday.
Dr Mubarak on the occasion highlighted the role of research and innovation in instigating sustainable growth in the agriculture sector and economic uplift of rural communities in the Punjab province. He provided evidence from a World Bank study, which suggests that the innovation system in the province has contributed about half of the overall 3 per cent growth in the agriculture sector since 1971, and in money terms its contribution goes in to billions of US$.
Mubarak Ali said that the constraints in agricultural research and innovation system, which include little and inappropriate investment on research, lack of co-ordinated planning, monitoring & evaluation, focus on routine rather than problem-solving research and little commercialisation of research outputs. Due to these constraints, he informed the Executive Committee that the rate of innovation in the agriculture sector has slowed down during the last decade, which resulted in increased production- and marketing-costs, and turned the sector uncompetitive in international markets.
The PARB was created to overcome some of these constraints, but unless private sector like FAP, politicians and government take keen interest in boosting the solution-based research & innovation system in the province, the agriculture sector will continue growing at 2-3 per cent instead of its potential of 6-8 per cent annual growth.
He told FAP that farmers, being the main beneficiaries of the solution-based innovations, should demonstrate their concerns on its plight and demand appropriate investment to resolve its constraints. While explaining the achievements of PARB, Dr Mubarak informed that with in a span of just two and a half year, 53 solution-based research projects in crops and livestock sectors have been initiated costing less than Rs 200 million a year.
Unless these projects reaches to 200 and annual investment on solution-based research reaches to Rs one billion along with Rs 2 billion a year subsidy to promote these innovations to the stakeholders, the high growth targets in the agriculture sector cannot be achieved. Without such investment, farmers will continue achieving low yields, their incomes will remain abysmal and Pakistan will continue loosing competitiveness in international markets, he added.
Discussing the crop wise projects in details he informed that 8 projects on wheat, 6 on cotton, 4 on rice, 3 on sugarcane, 4 on vegetable, 7 on fruits, 11 on livestock and 6 miscellaneous projects are in operation under PARB, which attempts to resolve major issues like CLCV in cotton, BLB in rice, stem rust in wheat, drought, salinity, frost, and cold tolerance in various crops, and specify Standard Operating Procedures (SOP) for disease free and economically-viable seedling in potato, olive and date palm. Few projects have completed their research phase and research products from these are now being commercialised.
These include SOP for direct seeding, controlled atmosphere technology for mango, pepper, and apple for long distance haulage, indigenous skin-coating material, indigenous material for protecting wheat in storage, drought tolerant wheat, protecting wheat from aphid, etc. "The PARB has developed and linked national and international research institutes in collaborative mode through these projects", he added.
The main reason of our success is transparent system of awarding projects on competitive basis, strict monitoring on the basis of quantitative milestones and incentives to the scientists and institutes for delivering research products, and building cross institute collaboration within and across the public and private sector research institutes. For the information of participants he told that international institutes are also linked in several projects.
Dr Tariq Bucha President FAP thanked Mubarak Ali for the briefing and acknowledged the efforts of PARB for bringing the fruits of science and innovations to the farmers. He suggested that Crop Committees of FAP should closely interact with PARB so that it can better focus on priority issues that can benefit a larger group of farmers and farming communities.
Chaudhry Hamid Malhi highly appreciated Mubarak for his briefing and proposed to improve the collaboration between PARB and FAP through more consultative meetings and suggested FAP to see how it can help PARB in its project identification and implementation processes.