LAHORE: Earmarking Rs15.50 billion, more than the double of last year’s Rs7 billion, for agriculture sector this year, the Annual Development Programme (ADP) promises to continue 39 on-going schemes and launch five new ones during the next year.

Highlighting vulnerabilities of the sector, the ADP document fears that it could shrink by two to seven percent and its vulnerability is as high as 87pc because of coronavirus pandemic. Under the circumstances, the sector needs transformation, it suggests.

With the allocation of over Rs15 billion, the government plans 305 new watercourses and will also carry out lining of another 1,231 watercourses.

Similarly, it plans to rehabilitate 372 irrigation schemes in non-command areas of the province.

It would also launch 10,000 “high-efficiency” irrigation schemes, besides planting olive trees on 760 acres.

Cultivation of oil seed crops on 80,636 acres and development of another 24,890 acres is also part of the planning.

Award of matching grants to farmers cultivating 35,000 acres and provision of seed (wheat and oilseed) for over 500,000 acres also forms part of the ADP.

The Punjab government has also allocated another Rs4 billion for fighting locust and provide Rs1bn to the Provincial Disaster Management Authority (PDMA).

Reacting to the budgetary allocation, Zafar Hayat, a farmers’ leader from south, says the Punjab was suffering a major cotton and maize crisis right now that had been ignored by the planners.

“It has been a perennial crisis with the sector that Punjab government makes budget rosy with higher but unspecified allocations and then no one knows where the money is spent. All those specific schemes mentioned in the document are foreign-funded. Where is the detail of locust spending? How would government spend Rs4 billion of Covid allocation? No one knows and no one will ever know. The farmers expect provincial government to give details of the spending so that they could follow how much of it [is being] spent on locust control and how much is whisked away to other politically preferred schemes,” he says.

Published in Dawn, June 16th, 2020