ISLAMABAD: The Special Committee on Agriculture will present the proposed seven-year agriculture sector growth strategy to Prime Minister Imran Khan in the next few days.

The National Assembly Speaker and Chairman Special Committee on Agriculture, Asad Qaisar asked Syed Fakhar Imam, Federal Minister for National Food Security and Research (NFS&R) to spearhead a meeting with the prime minister for presenting the committee's proposed programme.

He said this after Shandana Gulzar Khan, the convener of sub-committee of the special committee on agriculture, briefed the main committee on the proposed programme.

Qaiser also asked the NFS&R to convene a meeting of the provincial agricultural departments to ensure that the provinces were on-board for implementation of the programme.

The chairman asked the sub-committee to propose necessary amendments in the regulatory and legal framework.

He said that the prime minister was taking interest in agriculture, and he wanted to take effective steps for improvement of agriculture sector of the country.

He said that a task force would be made for improvement of the agriculture sector after the approval of the policy.

The speaker also said that being an agricultural country, it was very unfortunate that we imported food items.

For the first time after the 18th amendment, the government is developing a seven-year agriculture sector growth strategy, he said. On the recommendations of the members of the committee, he directed to convene a meeting with the governor State Bank of Pakistan (SBP) to address the structural constraints in smallholder farmers' access to credit.

MNA Shandana, convener of sub-committee of the special committee on agriculture, briefed the committee on the seven-year agriculture sector growth strategy before the committee.

She said that the objective of the strategy was to achieve five percent sustainable growth rate of the agriculture sector.

The guiding principles of the strategy include, a pro-poor growth strategy focusing on the smallholder farmers, an ecosystem approach addressing all components of the farmer's value chain, business model approach rather than subsidy approach, which has no exit strategy, phased growth strategy and reforms to re-distribute the current value chain profits more toward the smallholder farmers, she said.

She said that adopting a value-chain approach, in phase-I of the strategy, an alternate value chain structure for the small farmers would be implemented to increase their crop yield. In the next phase, gross domestic product (GDP) growth would be driven mainly by increase in the farm land by small farmers further increasing their incomes, she said, adding that in phase-III, the small farmers would graduate toward high-value crops and value addition.

The MNA said that the expected impact of the proposed strategy would not only increase agriculture and national GDP but also reduce rural poverty, drive rural economic growth, increase financial inclusion, support increase in agriculture exports and empower women who were mostly engaged in livestock activities.

She said that the total number of small farmers in the country was 7.4 million but had a weak business model mainly due to lack of access to production loans from the banking sector and lack of access to competitive markets.

"The financing gap between the cost of cultivation of the five major crops, and the level of production loans, allows the middlemen to deploy informal finance for the farmers for purchase of inputs such as fertiliser, seeds, and pesticides," she said, adding that that was the point in the farmer's value chain where the middlemen lock-in the small farmers and bind them to sell their produce at lower than market rates to the financing middlemen.

MNA Sher Ali Arbab said that poverty would come down with increase in agriculture growth rate.

Copyright Business Recorder, 2020