ISLAMABAD, May 19: Pakistan's expenditure on agricultural research is one of the lowest in the world and is continually declining with grave implications for food security and economic solvency of the country
, Chairman of Pakistan Agricultural Research Council (PARC) Dr Badaruddin Soomro said here on Wednesday.
He was speaking at the two-day national conference on 'Sustainable Agriculture for Rural Development and Poverty Alleviation' organized by 'Progress', a Karachi-based NGO, in collaboration with the Sindh Department of Agriculture and Forests.
On the first day of deliberations, nearly half a number of presentations were made. But most of the discussion was rather lop-sided and superficial because the speakers, while stressing the need of raising food production, forgot that even more serious problem was the lack of distributive justice.
The latest allocations to the National Agricultural Research System (NARS) were approximately Rs1,100 million, while the operational expenditure for actual research had declined by 10-15 per cent in recent years.
The PARC chairman said the yearly expenditure on capital items remained zero in most cases with NARS of Pakistan being persistently dependent on foreign sources for purchase of research equipment and vehicles.
An agri-based country though, Pakistan was a food-insecure country, he said. It could avert a disastrous situation only through adequate investment in NARS for raising productivity on a sustainable basis and alleviating poverty which is a phenomenon typifying the situation in the rural areas.
Among the causes for low priority to agricultural development, Dr Soomro said, was the lack of political will to take the risk of long-gestation biological research, short planning horizon relative to the time lag between the investment in farm research and the benefits accruing therefrom.
He said the Indian Agricultural Research Council (IARC) had an annual budget of Rs15 billion as against the Rs470 million provided to PARC. Equipped with these financial resources, IARC, unlike PARC, is independent of bureaucratic control. It had its own 33 national agricultural research centres (NARCs) as against only one in case of PARC.
In his inaugural address earlier, the National Assembly speaker, Chaudhry Amir Hussain, said poverty forced people to migrate to urban areas but this only exacerbated their destitution.
Chairman of Progress Dr M.A. Wajid said the global population was multiplying at the rate of 90 million people per annum. This meant that farmers would have to increase food production by more than 50 per cent to feed some two billion more people by 2020.
This challenge, however, had to be met while avoiding further degradation of natural resources, he said. Sindh Minister for Agriculture Arif Mustafa Jatoi, recounting the efforts of his government to develop agriculture, said it had started work on provision of 4,000 water courses in the province.
