EDITORIAL: Now that ample rain has ensured sufficient water availability for Kharif season, federal and provincial governments should press the advantage so the agriculture sector can transform in accordance with IMF’s conditions.
The Fund demands deregulation, of course, which means that farmers can forget about the support price; which became such a contentious issue last season when policymakers either could not ensure it or simply withdrew it right at the peak of harvesting.
The challenge now is not just to get farmers to sow more wheat, especially when they’re considering other options because they were forced to dump their crops at throw-away prices last time.
It is to persuade them to sow more and embrace modern technology and use better quality seeds as the season’s outlook brightens. There will be no more subsidies and the government will have to cut its umbilical cord with the sector, so there’s no choice but to implement long-delayed reforms and improve/upgrade the sector’s performance.
But that’s hardly the only challenge. The Rabi season outlook is rosy because of excess rains, which is very welcome news. Yet headlines also speak of a projected 19pc water shortage for Kharif.
And that, as always, is because we still have no way of storing whatever excess water the rains deliver us. All that high-level talk of dams, which was all the rage just a few years ago, seems to have gone right back into cold storage.
Dams serve the dual purpose of storing water and generating hydel power, no doubt, but building them is very challenging. They must be built on mountains and require overcoming controversies (in some cases), financial troubles, and time constraints.
But water reservoirs can be built on planes, they are not controversial, they do not need international financial institutions to bankroll them, and making them is also one of the government’s core responsibilities.
Yet this has never been a policy priority even as previous water is wasted every year and the country has lost its natural advantage of being a one-time net agri exporter.
Let’s not forget, of course, that agriculture also feeds the country’s premier export sector, and since we’re unable to grow fine cotton variants that go into value added textiles, our chronic dependence on agri imports extends to our flagship export also.
It was reported some months earlier, when the SIFC (Special Investment Facilitation Council) first started keeping checks on economic planning/policy, that the new body was shocked to discover that there had been no reserves worth mentioning built in about 40 years.
This is not surprising, since this is about the same timeframe when Pakistan squandered its natural advantage in agriculture; and also in water security. It wasn’t that long ago, after all, that Pakistan was a comfortably water-abundant country. Now it is one of the most water-scarce ones in the world.
One can only hope that IMF’s push will finally do the trick. It’s because each administration has always delayed reforms in every sector that all of them must be undertaken at the same time now.
This is a very demanding situation. But this is what it’ll take to stay on IMF funding and avoid default; at least for the duration of the EFF (Extended Fund Facility). Agriculture reforms will need to transform the entire sector, especially overcoming its resistance to modern technology.
And we will need to conserve water. If our farmers follow irrigation methods and seeding techniques that were considered novel centuries ago, and we continue to waste all our water, then there’s no hope for a turnaround.
It’s already a shame that reforms have been delayed this long and the country has to be arm-twisted by an outside power into doing what is desperately in its own interest.
Copyright Business Recorder, 2024