“Take away everything subsidies, support price, interest-free loans but give us a better research regime. Make it a single-line budget that starts and ends with research,” this seems to be a consensus among farmers, their representative bodies and independent analysts, as the nation waits for the next finance bill.
Articulating those sentiments, Bilal Israel of the Farmers Associate Pakistan says that the last two decades, especially the persistent cotton crisis, have proven that Pakistan does not have dependable seeds for most of the crops. They are either expensive imports, or the farmer suffers. Rapid climate change has added another dimension to the challenge. This is an existential emergency that cannot be dealt with through small subsidies here or there or making small loans less expensive; these things help lessen the pain but do not treat the disease.
The Punjab Assembly last week passed “The Sugar Factories (control) (Amendment) Act,” reversing all ‘pro-farmers decisions’ it had taken in the two ordinances at the start of last crushing season and claimed much credit and political mileage out of them.
The Act has drawn sharp and negative reaction from all sides, except of course from the millers who are now being accused of manoeuvring their way through the provincial government and assembly at the cost of farmers.
All farmers’ bodies are threatening protests, picketing the Punjab Assembly, sit-in in front of the CM House and a march on Islamabad. The Food Department denies, rather vehemently, proposing it and says it was also surprised, if not shocked, to receive it through the media.
The wholesalers are reporting around 40 per cent drop in sales in Punjab, with truckloads of fruit waiting for days in markets before finding a buyer. Reuters/File
LAHORE: Pakistan’s fruit market is tailspinning into chaos. The wholesalers are reporting around 40 per cent drop in sales in Punjab, with truckloads of fruit waiting for days in markets before finding a buyer – mostly at a price far less than farmers and wholesalers’ calculations.
There has been no price panic typical of the holy month; conversely, for the first time in last many years, prices of a number of fruits (melon, strawberry) are dropping, at least at wholesale level.
If proof is needed for under-utilisation, ineffectiveness, irrelevance or even failure of agriculture institutions, the district of Faisalabad provides it. Having four internationally-acclaimed institutions in its precinct for more than a century, its agricultural pattern and productivity are still fossilised and its performance is as good, or as bad, as that of any other bad-performing district in Punjab including the remotest one like Rajanpur.
If taken out of performance context, the names and history of these institutions are imposing. The Punjab Agricultural College and Research Institute, Lyallpur, that later morphed into a university has been there since 1906. When education and research divorced each other in 1962, the college became a university and the Ayub Research Center was born with researchers stuffed in it to lead the green revolution.