ISLAMABAD, Jan 13: Federal Minister for Food, Agriculture and Livestock Sikandar Hayat Bosan here on Thursday feared a major shortfall in the next wheat crop due to availability of 47 per cent less irrigation water this year.
"We are already faced with acute water shortage, especially for the Rabi crops. If this shortage persists during the crop season, we will have a major shortfall in our next wheat crop," the minister said, while speaking at a stakeholders meeting on "Climate change and water availability in Pakistan" held at the Pakistan Academy of Sciences here.
Though, Mr Bosan said, the government had taken various measures to ensure that there was no wheat shortage for the consumers next year, the problem was more complex and was likely to aggravate further in the coming years, especially in light of the climatic changes and the global warming trend".
It is to be mentioned here that the ministry has set a wheat target of 20.2 million tons for this season compared to the annual consumption of 20.6 million tons meaning that the country would face a shortage of 400,000 tons in next season even after achieving the 20.2 million ton target. For the ongoing season, the government has already allowed import of 1.5 million tons of wheat.
The country's population, Mr Bosan said, was likely to cross the figure of 221 million by 2025, therefore, the requirements for food and fibre would increase substantially.
In a bid to meet the food requirement of such a big population, we would need more water since most of our agriculture areas lay in the arid to semi-arid belt and crop production was only possible with irrigation, the minister added.
"We are already using about 95 per cent of the total stored water for irrigation. In other sectors, especially municipal water supply and water for drinking and sanitation, we need to make a major expansion during the next two decades," Mr Bosan said.
He said the country should overhaul the organization and management of its irrigation system and incorporate the latest scientific knowledge in crop production to optimise the use of water for crop production. The country, he said, could no more afford the age-old method of 'flood irrigation' and an inflexible 'wara-bundi' system under the changing scenario.
Pakistan has to critically review its cropping patterns after analyzing crop productivity per unit of water and the net benefit to the farmers and the country from the limited quantity of water available, he said.
This, he observed, could result in reduction of area under water-intensive crops like rice and sugarcane and emphasized growing crops requiring less water. The zero tillage method, which was successfully demonstrated for rice and wheat crops rotation and resulted in substantial water saving and more economic crop production, would be extended to other parts of the country, he said.
