PESHAWAR, Aug 12: The import of hybrid seeds of vegetables from India and European countries has badly affected the farmers as the local agriculturists are unable to produce and supply such seeds to the local market owing to the lack of facilities, seeds dealers informed Dawn on Monday.

The seeds of vegetables including okra (lady fingers), cucumber, radish, carrot, turnip, cauliflower, aubergine (brinjal), courgette, cabbage and gourd etc., are being imported from India, Holland, America, South Korea, Japan, Denmark and China by the Pakistani seed dealers.

According to an agricultural scientist, they cannot produce quality seeds in the country because of the inadequate infrastructure here.

Despite the fact that agriculture is the mainstay of the country’s economy, still the farmers depend on the imported seeds of vegetables, he said.

However, two years back the production of seeds of lady fingers, chilly, turnip and tomato was started by Agricultural Institute Turnab, Peshawar and Faisalabad University, which, the farmers say, could prove a landmark achievement provided these two institutes supplied quality seeds to the market.

The local available seeds are economical as well as easily available to the farmers, but the quality and quantity of production is far less than that of the imported ones.

But the farmers argue that the local produce would lessen their dependence on the imported seeds for which they paid higher sums.

“This year, we imported seeds from India via Dubai for which we paid almost three times the actual amount which we had been paying in taxes over the years,” said a dealer.

He said that the prices of the seeds imported from India through land route were affordable, but this year owing to tension on the Line of Control, it was imported by air through Dubai for which air-fare was paid at the rate of Rs100 per kilogramme.

The market for imported seeds would decline if the production of local seeds continued because the farmers from the last three years have been complaining of the low production from the imported seeds, said a dealer, adding that the farmers, like the officials of agriculture department, do not pay any attention to research work and use traditional ways of farming.

The farmers have to pay Rs4,000 for a packet of 100 gram of imported seeds of cucumber.

The locally produced cucumber of the same quantity could cost less than Rs1,000, said an agriculturist.

Similarly, he said the dealers would be saved from incurring losses because the farmers do not purchase the seeds after its expiry date and the companies concerned do not compensate them.

By producing the seeds locally, the dealers would be able to inform the manufacturing firms about the expiry of stocks.

Each seed had two to three years’ life.

The dealers said the seeds are required by the farmers for most parts of the year because most of the vegetables are sown twice a year and the farmers in Mardan, Peshawar, Swat and Charsadda buy the seeds in bulk.