While the State Bank of Pakistan (SBP) Report for the financial year 2003 is generally a mixed bag comprising positive developments in practically all sectors leading to a negative conclusion, it is more so for the agriculture sector that registers strong recovery contributing to devastating growth in poverty.

Poverty has not been bifurcated into urban and rural populations. However, considering the demographic profile of the country, rural areas must have made a much larger contribution to proliferation of poverty as it represents about 70 per cent population. It has thus become a case of good tidings culminating in grief.

There is an element of fictitiousness in agriculture sector statistics. It is not there for the first time; The reports and yearly economic surveys have thrived on misrepresentation of facts year after year but that passed because over all conditions were not grim, the population was relatively small and trends and practices in the society were far more ruthless, callous and exploitative in the past.

Fictitiousness, one would refrain from calling it premeditated because it is the expert’s constant method for assessing the agriculture sector’s productivity, comes from confusing the sector’s calendar with other economic areas of life. Agriculture does not follow the same pattern. Overlap is part of the crop’s cycle. Production periods do not observe the routine of financial years.

As a result of this method, forecasts are included as established facts. They may be reliable but there is always room for slips as has happened more than once in recent years. In the current year for instance, the cotton crop’s target, estimated yield and final produce are, to say the least, unlikely to tally.

This is true of all crops where the final output remains to be determined and actually applies even to fully harvested crops for which official statistics do not match private sector evaluations. That, however, is another issue. The resurgence of the agriculture sector would normally be an occasion for celebrations but factors causing misgivings listed above and the SBP’s own conclusions plus assessment of the ground situation tamper ones joy: statistics may be correct but the results they throw up are not the same as inventoried by the State Bank.

According to the SBP, rice crop led the recovery. Sugarcane, wheat, maize and gram were, in that order, crops that boosted the sector’s performance. Minor crops also showed marginally higher growth rate. That is the bright side of the picture of the sector.

But other crops declined. They included cotton, Pakistan’s main forex earner and vital to the national economy. The first thing that comes to mind is that any drop in cotton output is sufficient to outweigh gains in other crops and its impact is greater on the economy than, for example, sugar cane.

The report also notes, quite correctly, that productivity was low despite improvements in yields; tobacco, a high yield crop of Pakistan is nevertheless ‘one third lower that for the most efficient producer, Japan’. It adds that yields were significantly below international standards in maize and cane crops. All this amounts to a negative view of the sector that the State Bank identifies as the scene of recovery.

The report points out that as the four cash crops are cultivated across the country, benefit in the rise in prices was widely distributed. What is one to make out of that in the context of 33 per cent rise in poverty that represents a minimum of 75 per cent of the impoverished in rural areas.

One would like to know the source of information of the Bank for a ‘rise in prices’ because there is no authentication of this contention from the market. If anything, the price situation has worsened both directly and indirectly. Wheat price has remained static for the last three years while the cost of inputs, as also the cost of living, has substantially increased in this period. Cotton growers, that is, the small farmers, are almost invariably on the losing side of bargains.

The cane growers lot is no secret. Year after year they clamour for payment of dues only to confront with promises that they know are not made for fulfilment. The current crisis marking the dealings of sugar millers with cane grower may have built after the report was sent for printing but it is only a grimmer version of the yearly routine.

The market’s treatment of growers of smaller crops including vegetables is even worse. What sells in the bazaars for Rs20 per kg is usually purchased from the farmer at less than five rupees for the same quantity. That inequity is the order of the agriculture sector is not a secret; it is the all-pervasive prevailing norm.

Yet the SBP believes that there has not only been a rise in prices of agriculture produce but that it has been widely distributed too. This is an amazing conclusion that could only be made with eyes and years closed and irrevocable commitment to ignore incontrovertible facts on ground.

The part of the report dealing with the agriculture sector reads like a document prepared in a glass-enclosed cubicle with its view of the outside world barred. The only part of the report that one can unhesitatingly accept is increase in the number of people living below the poverty line though even that may be on the lower side.

I have seen and met farmers toiling round the clock, round the year and still unable or at best, barely able to meet basic needs of life. The small farmers are the wretched of our local earth and not because they were destined to be so but by the design of exploitative classes. The SBP Report for FY 03 must have been seen by these elements as approval and support for their practices.

The report reminds me of the letter one had read in a magazine for children decades back. It was addressed by a village boy to a relative residing in a city and informed the relative of the ailment or death of an animal and some relatives, collapse of a thatched roof, burning of grain stock and other such events one by one, concluding every incident with expression of gratitude that the ‘rest is fine”.

Apparently, the ‘rest’ is also fine for the State Bank of Pakistan.