May 31, 2006	Wednesday	Jumadi-ul-Awwal 3, 1427

ISLAMABAD, May 30: The government has decided to allocate Rs11.8 billion, which is 30 per cent more than the current year’s figure, for agriculture sector under the Public Sector Development Programme (PSDP) for the next fiscal year.

Presiding over a meeting to finalise proposals for the finance ministry to be incorporated in the upcoming budget here on Tuesday, Federal Minister for Food, Agriculture and Livestock (Minfal) Sikandar Hayat Bosan disclosed that the government had increased the allocation in the PSDP as it accorded high priority to agriculture sector.

He said the ministry would also be starting a special programme for productivity enhancement of small farmers covering 1,300 villages to be implemented by 2015. The programme would reduce by half the existing yield gap between progressive and small farmers.

The meeting was informed that Rs3bn would be allocated in the next budget for two major projects aimed at enhancing community driven milk and dairy production and increasing the production of red meat. For the commercialisation of the livestock sector, private sector-led companies included Dairy Development Board and Dairy Development Company had already been established.

Efforts would be taken to establish 2,950 new animal farms and 1,200 model dairy farms. An amount of Rs2.8bn would be given to the Pakistan Agricultural Research Council (PARC) to strengthen research, while the Central Cotton Research Institute, Multan would also be upgraded.

However, the PARC officials informed the meeting that inadequate and inflexible funding was the main hurdle in the way of research in agriculture, food and livestock.

According to the existing budgetary rules of the finance ministry, 85 per cent of the funds of PARC went to the salaries of the staff, while half of the remaining 15 per cent was spent on hiring of houses for employees.

They said the finance ministry had recently disclosed that after the three times increase in the salaries of the staff in the last three years, 87 per cent of the allocated money of each and every department went to salaries, while half of the remaining 13 per cent was consumed by hiring of houses for workers.

The meeting also proposed the government to extend the base of agricultural loans’ write-off to Rs500,000 principal amount.