ISLAMABAD, April 30: The government would soon launch Rs4 billion “food security” programme aimed at achieving self-reliance in agricultural commodities. Official sources told Dawn that ADB has agreed to extend Rs1.8 billion for Rs4 billion programme, which also aimed at improving productivity of crops and livestock and to develop a market-oriented demand based production system which will lead to the increased production as well as increasing the income of farmers. The programme seeks to develop a dynamic, competitive and internationally compliant agribusiness sector. The existing constraints have a national impact because the government decision-making process and facilitation capacity in the agribusiness was limited and not cohesive. Also, the private sector was not dynamic, competitive and internationally compliant to promote the agribusiness sector.

The ADB has found the new programme consistent with Bank’s Country Strategy Programme (CSP 2002- 2006) as it would focus on having high value cash and horticultural crops and the development of livestock for meat production, milk collection/processing and dairy development.

The programme aimed at promoting growth in the agricultural sector. The government admitted that the agribusiness sector could not grow and show its share in GNP despite being in existence for the last many years. This is due to a large number of problems/constraints faced by this sector which kept it depressed.

These constraints, officials said, needed to be addressed with a comprehensive and system approach as world agricultural product markets were demanding increasingly higher product quality, and unless Pakistan’s agribusiness product conform to these standards, this sector will not be able to enter, let alone compete, on world markets under WTO regime.

It was, therefore, imperative that the key constraints in the agribusiness sector leading to its poor performance identified so far be removed which included institutional constraints that is basically weak or nonexistent public-private partnership, weak institutional capacity and poor coordination between the government agencies and an absence of demand-driven agricultural research and extension.

Policy recommendations within the agribusiness sector concentrate on the improvement of the marketing and market intelligence, improved product quality and shelf life through sound post-harvest practices, achievement of international compliance, and promoting the establishment of processing plants nationally to give greater value addition at source and improving the bulking up, collection and storage of raw materials.

In this behalf, special attention would be paid to establish farmer groups for effective marketing and collective bargaining, and for them to increase production of quality raw material through improved production practices and the establishment of enterprise associations to produce quality brands, through grading, certification, quality control and labelling.