In a recent pre-budget meeting with Chief Minister Shahbaz Sharif, the agriculture department identified six areas — seed sector development, farm mechanisation, provision of inexpensive inputs, cheaper credit, cooperative farming and improved productivity — as priorities for the next budget.

In the crop sector, more money would flow into pulses and vegetables and to support it all, the research and development (R&D) would get significant part of budget, and provide guiding principles to policymakers and farmers.

Such a meeting is in itself a positive development and a different beginning with the chief minister himself presiding over a meeting exclusively on agriculture. Officials are at least projecting it as a sign of realisation on the CM’s part that agriculture needs serious attention.

However, the farmers’ concerns are rooted in the pattern of governance and leadership model of the chief minister — his penchant for quick results and strong urge for creating an instant social and political impact of his actions. But the agriculture sector does not fit the model where growth is painfully slow, erratic and uncertain. Once production falls for any reason, the sector goes out of political favour. To check these trends, the agriculture needs a high level of planning, effective execution and higher level of political, financial and administrative commitments. The sector, however, remained largely neglected in the first year of the present government.

If the country has to achieve 7pc growth that PML-N is aiming at, its agriculture has to grow by at least 4pc per annum

It is argued that the province harvested four bumper crops — wheat, maize, rice and sugarcane — this year but it may take Herculean effort to sustain this level of production. In that case, the crucial question remains if the chief minister can continue treading the agricultural leadership path he seems to have chosen. To the farmers, the coming budget would provide some clues.

Apart from the areas Punjab has selected for itself, there is a number of others that need equal, if not more, attention. The absence of individual crop strategies is one of them. The province has no wheat vision or has devised ways to control cotton crisis. It has no clue as to what national or provincial wheat requirements 10 years down the line will be, or what its textile industry will require to meet its expanding cotton needs.

What would be the role of the government in wheat or cotton trade? What would be its pulses requirement in 2025 or how much vegetables it would need to feed ever-expanding population. All crop estimates are based on previous year’s targets or performance. Even they are revised upwards or downwards during the crop cycle according to weather conditions. With weather turning erratic, the province revises those figures at unprecedented frequency and is not sure about final figure till the last moment. Revision of wheat size this year explains the point. Only a long-term plan, broken into short- and long-term targets, can provide benchmark for budgetary performance.

If the country has to achieve 7pc growth that PML-N is aiming at, its agriculture has to develop at least at 4pc. And if national agriculture has to attain that level of growth, the sector in Punjab, which produces over 80pc of it, has to grow, as the experts put it, at 5pc. Taking the growth from current 2pc to 5pc would take huge fund diversion to farming, very dynamic leadership and latest technologies. It has limited land base and even limited water resources. Thus, new technologies are the only option.

The current inadequate level of investment in basic technologies is evident from its present machine pool. The Punjab government has a total 338 bulldozers and all of them gifted by others for projects or government. The last one inducted in that pool was in 1993.

With these machines, it can level around 20,000 acres a year and may take 200 years to bring five million acres of new land that the province needs to bring under cultivation.

This budget has raised hopes for two reasons: recent federal emphasis on the sector and some follow-up meetings, including the chief ministerial one, at provincial level. One hopes that farmers’ expectations do not crash after the budget.

Published in Dawn, Economic & Business, June 2nd, 2014