July 15, 2002	Monday	Jamadi-ul-Awwal 4, 1423

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THATTA, July 14: The impact of drought, shortage of water in canals, sea intrusion, earthquake and approximately 90 per cent saline underground water in Sindh has destroyed the land and its reclamation will become difficult unless strategies on war-footings were adopted to counter the situation.

According to the sources in the Sindh agriculture and irrigation departments, statistics of 2000-01, reveal the area under cultivation for wheat and rice fell by 29.5 per cent and 20.9 per cent respectively in Sindh compared to national average decline estimated at 1.7 per cent and 5.5 percent respectively, due to which purchasing power in rural areas and employment opportunities in the urban areas have been reduced.

The Sindh province has also been affected due to acute shortage of river water and short of rains in 2001-02 which has created a worst impact on socio-economic conditions of the province.

The achievements against target reveal that area under wheat fell by 15.8 per cent in Sindh against the national average decline of four per cent and area under gram fell by 54 per cent against national average decline of 7.1 percent.

In case of rice, the area under cultivation is 413,000 hectares against the target of 500,000 hectares (13.4 per cent decline) in Sindh, whereas the area under rice in Punjab has been estimated at 1.358 million hectares as against the target of 1.375 million hectares (1.2 percent decline).

Although the government has fixed target of Rabi and Kharif crops in lower side, but the ground realities indicate that the situation is worse than estimated.

The farming community is facing great problems in Sindh due to acute shortage of water in the canal command area and the target fixed even in lower side will not be achieved.

The colossal losses due to sea intrusion as a result of reduced flow below Kotri due to upstream storages have inundated 159 dehs of eight talukas of Thatta and Badin districts spread over an area of 1.22 million acres shattering the socio-economic life of people, besides the deltaic mangroves, a breeding ground for fish and shrimp and producing fodder for animals, fuel wood and wood for boat making has been reduced from 240,000 hectares to 20,000 hectares.

As an aftermath of calamities, poverty in rural Sindh has thus reached the level of 70-80 per cent of the defined poverty income level and the unemployment which was 25 percent in 1990 has increased sharply as high as 36.1 per cent in the year 2002.

Out of the 5.7 million hectares cultivated area in Sindh, cultivable waste is 1.4 million hectares (15.8 per cent), water-logging and salinity affects 2.32 million hectares of land and the soil erosion affects 0.6 million hectares.

Sources said that Sindh province, having cultivable area of 141,014 square kilometres at the extreme tail-end of the mighty Indus River, would periodically be ruined if adequate measures were not adopted.

The Provincial Secretary of Agriculture, Aftab Qureshi, when requested to comment on the situation, said that he had taken over the charge only a couple of days back and was not fully conversant with the agriculture related issues.

He said that it would be premature to comment officially anything about hyper-salinity, sea intrusion or rapid ruination of land in Sindh.

The Provincial Minister for Agriculture, Sardar Muqeem Khoso, could not be contacted as he had left for Jacobabad.