FAISALABAD, Dec 4: Around 40,000 hectares of arable land in Pakistan are being swallowed up annually because of salinity. Federal Science and Technology Minister Nauraiz Shakoor said this while addressing an inaugural session of international conference on `Sustainable crop production on salt-affected land’ organised by Saline Agriculture Research Centre at the University of Agriculture Faisalabad (UAF) here on Monday. Vice-chancellor Dr Bashir Ahmed was also among the participants.

The minister said the salinity had become a significant constraint on country’s agriculture, adding two tons of salt per hectare every year.

He said that salinity was not only reducing the production of crops but also affecting the well-being of the people and the country as a whole.

The government and international agencies, he said, had spent millions of rupees to check salinity and waterlogging. The salinity alone was causing a loss of Rs900 million to the national exchequer.

He maintained that over Rs26 billion had been incurred on the Salinity Control and Reclamation Programme (SCARP).

He said Pakistan was one of the countries with the highest deforestation rate in the world and efforts should be made to earmark 10 percent of the land for forestation to maintain biodiversity and ecological well-being as recommended by the World Bank and the UN.

UAF VC Dr Bashir Ahmad said that problems of soil and water salinity, shortage of good quality water, smallholdings, poor marketing system and high cost of inputs threatened the sustainability of the agriculture.

He said the one-third of the total 20 million hectare available land for agriculture in the country was salt-affected. The drought spell and ambient shortage of canal water had forced the use of poor quality water for irrigation that had aggravated the problem of salt stress to crops.

The UAF, he said, could provide a platform to address problems in a coordinated fashion. The network must be established and strengthened by improving relations with South Asian countries to share knowledge and seek solutions pertaining to soil and salinity.

Wyn Jones, an international scientist, highlighting the consequences of salinity problems, said over 97 percent water resources were sea-based and salty which were useless for agriculture purpose.

He said only 2.09 percent of water resources were ice-based and 0.60 percent total water resources globally was underground water and being used for agriculture and drinking purposes.

He said that 30 percent of the irrigated land was subject to salinity, waterlogging and other relevant problems which needed to be addressed in the wake of rapidly increasing population and food demand.

Dr Riaz Hussain, HEC advisor, said that 6.3 million hectare land was affected by salinity in the country and about half of the land was situated in the canal command area. Out of this, he said 1.1 mha was dense saline sodic soils, extremely difficult to reclaim.

He said over 70 percent of tubewells were pumping out poor quality water in Punjab and the ratio was higher in the Sindh province.

Scientists needed to understand that there was a huge intra-field variability and different proportions of land within each field being cultivated might have low salinity, medium salinity and very high salinity, while farmers were interested only in high yields.

He expressed his concern over the misconception by farmers and policymakers who treated the salt-affected land as wasteland whereas soil scientists regarded this land as `wasted land’ that could be made productive even without reclamation.