AFTER some five years of planning, the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) in 2015 established three centres for advanced studies in agriculture and food security, water and energy at three different universities in Punjab, Sindh and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa.

These centres were connected to four universities in the United States through an elaborate scholarship programme.

However, with the new administration taking over in the US and cuts in the USAID budget, one of the centres, the Pakistan-US Centre for Advanced Studies in Agriculture and Food, now faces the axe.

Punjab will suffer the most as it depends heavily on the centre for policy guidance and because there is no alternative

The centre, considered to be the most vibrant among the three, assumed added importance in the last two years due to some particular federal and provincial reasons.

At the national level, it was the only advanced studies centre working on policy that had over 250 scholars at its strength and connected to the outside world as well.

However, its real importance was for Punjab, which is in the middle of a major agriculture initiative of its own through the Rs100 billion Kissan Commission.

Coincidently, the initiative for the agricultural sector coincided with the advent of the centre in 2015. In the next two years, the centre helped the commission define all the major initiatives, including the balanced use of fertiliser, cattle and produce markets, statutory cover for research spending, etc. Moreover, for the first time the province had an agricultural policy of its own.

The scholars at the University of Agriculture, where the centre is located, helped develop a 700-page document, which became the basis for 26 policy (and position) papers at the centre. This ultimately resulted into an 18-page executive summary of the provincial agriculture policy that Punjab is now following, with the rest of the policy to follow.

The centre is also supposed to assess and update all policy initiatives every six months in order to modify them for better results.

Now, with the centre being told to wrap up due to paucity of funds, Punjab is feared to suffer the most as it depends heavily on the centre for policy guidance and because there is no alternative.

Besides, the future of more than 250 scholars being financed by the centre and over 90 applied research projects is also on the line.

Since funding such centres is an internal matter and discretion of the USAID, Pakistan or Punjab can hardly do anything about it. The only way left for them is to take over the centre and run it out of their agriculture budgets, experts say.

“Apart from the policy contribution, the centre should not be allowed to close down because the concept of three centres — agriculture, water and energy — was an integrated one,” says Dr Iqrar Ahmed Khan, vice-chancellor of the Agriculture University and head of the centre on agriculture and food.

Both the federal and the Punjab government is considerate enough to sympathetically decide on the future of the centre, but the real issue is managing the “transition period”.

Even if they both take it over, it entails lengthy procedures to follow — feasibility, project cost (PC-I) estimations, approvals and so on.

Malik Afaq Tiwana, one of the board members, thinks that three chairs, which the centre created on precision agriculture, biotech and climate change, deal with future of agriculture in Pakistan.

They have come into their own now and their contribution in the next two years could have been equally immense, as was on the policy issue. The centre’s premature death would hurt the sector badly.

Published in Dawn, The Business and Finance Weekly, August 21st, 2017