Chairman of Federation of Pakistan Chambers of Commerce and Industry (FPCCI)'s regional standing committee Ahmad Jawad said that the country urgently needed post-harvest technology for its agriculture sector because adequate application of recommended post-harvest treatments not only minimise post-harvest losses but also maximise producer profits.
"Average annual growth of agriculture sector in Pakistan dropped from 5.4 per cent during 1980-90 to 2.2 per cent during 2011-16," he said talking to the Business Recorder adding that the growth during the past fiscal year (2015-16) plummeted to 0.2 per cent mainly due to 6.3 per cent decline in the crop sector.
He said public sector's capacity to invest in agriculture was on decline. He said that owing to lack of modernisation in agriculture, average growth in yields for cotton and wheat declined from 9 and 2.6 per cent respectively between 1980-90 to 2.2 and 1.4 per cent respectively between 2011 and 2016. "Prime Minister's Agriculture Package of Rs 341 billion and some fiscal incentives in the federal budget 2016-17 for the agriculture sector are not the solution," he said stressing that such short-term fiscal packages couldn't be an answer to structural problems faced by agriculture sector.
The FPCCI standing committee's chairman said that the problems included: 1) rising input costs being faced by the farmers; 2) indirect taxes on inputs and farm operations; 3) subsidies and support price benefits not reaching the poorest in the farming sector; 4) lack of innovation in seed varieties; 5) lack of technology to modernise the crop harvesting, cultivation, storage and marketing; 6) weak access to agriculture credit; and 7) water shortages threatening the irrigated lands.
He urged that in order to reverse this dismal situation, it was important to chalk out a viable long-term plan for the revival of this sector. The Planning Commission, ministry of national food security and research (MNFSR), provincial agriculture and agriculture extension departments, and provincial planning and development departments should collaborate and put forward a comprehensive national plan on agriculture for the approval of Council of Common Interests and the Parliament," he proposed.
Jawad further suggested that the government need to review the mark-up rates on a regular basis. He proposed that private commercial banking sector also needed to be encouraged through interventions from Ministry of Finance and State Bank of Pakistan, to increase micro-credit in agriculture extension.
He said a revision of fiscal responsibility and Debt Limitation Act should protect food security allocation and direct these protected expenditures towards poorest districts in the country. One additional criterion for selection of these districts should be malnutrition. The government should also revisit the zero-hunger programme which was halted due to budgetary constraints, he urged.