KARACHI, Jan 15: Speakers at a meeting on Wednesday stressed that all possible methods be adopted to produce sufficient food so that the country was not dependent on other countries.

Speaking at the concluding day of the two-day Food Security and Economic Sovereignty Conference organized by the Shirkat Gah, they said that in the present-day world the countries which were in control of the food resources of other countries actually controlled all the policies of those countries without physically occupying them.

A former Punjab minister, Shaheen Ateeq-ur-Rehman, stressed the importance of education in creating awareness among the masses. She said that once people became aware they could work and struggle to seek solutions for serious issues such as poverty and population.

She said her organization was running over 800 non-formal literacy centres in various districts of the Punjab, and between 25,000 and 30,000 young children were studying in them, while other centres run by her organization were offering education for grown-up children who, due to some reasons, could not go to the school.

She urged women councillors to try to create awareness among the people at the grassroots level and expressed the hope that the thousands of councillors could bring about a revolution in the rural areas by working hard.

Najma Sadeque of the Green Economics Initiative of Shirkat Gah said that under the corporate farming big companies obtained large tracks of agricultural lands and small farmers were elbowed out. The companies resorted to mono-culture that on one hand harmed biodiversity and on the other made the crops more vulnerable to pest attack.

She also suggested that rather than using chemical inputs — fertiliser, pesticides — in agriculture, traditional methods be adopted which would not degrade the soil and would bring down the input cost.

Navaid Hussain of Shehri said if the people organized themselves and followed the issues they would succeed in achieving results. He gave an example of Gutter Baghicha which the vested interest wanted to sell off to the builders and the land mafia, but after the issue was taken up, the government backed off and had now announced that it planed to develop a park on the site.

He also pointed out that vegetables being grown at the Gutter Baghicha were using industrial effluents for irrigation and were chemically contaminated causing many diseases. He demanded that the government spend less on non-development heads and increase its expenditure on the social sector.

Nazeer Ahmad Memon, highlighting the issues of food security in the Kutcha areas located along the banks of the Indus River, said that earlier over 2.1 million acres of kutcha lands were flooded by the river and yielded good crops every year that was not only sufficient for 1.5 million people and over 1.5 million strong livestock.

He said that after reservoirs were constructed upstream and water was regulated, the water supply decreased and now only 25,000 acres were under agriculture, and hundreds of fish ponds had also gone dry and the residents had become poor and were also shifting to other places to avoid hunger.

He said that now the government wanted to clear the forests in the kutcha areas on over 700,000 acres and give them to multinationals and other companies to introduce corporate farming, and as there was less water they had proposed to install nearly 5,000 tube-wells which would further lower the water-table in the vicinity. The water supply to the Indus delta would further decrease, he added.

An organic farmer M. Futehally, informing the audience about the vermi-composting, told them how to make fertilisers from the kitchen waste by using earthworms.

He also suggested that drip-irrigation — which uses a friction of the water used for flood irrigation — was a better choice for the arid zone regions like Karachi. He also suggested usage of bio-gas plants and windmills so the small farmers’ expenses came down.

Rahat Haque, a horticulturist, spoke on growing food in one’s own garden or in pots on the roof or in the balcony. Radia Khatib, a microbiologist, spoke on making compost from garbage.

A farmer from Malir, Shafi Mohammad Baloch, said that due to the sand and gravel excavation from various nullahs and the Malir Riverbed, the water-table had gone down in the area, and Malir which used to be a green oasis was fast becoming barren and the people there were loosing their livelihood and shifting to other places.

Meher Marker, Kishwar Naheed, Prof Lalarukh, Uzma Jokhio, Ali Hassan Abro and others also spoke on the occasion.