MULTAN, Aug 28: The provincial agriculture department has constituted a three-member committee to look into the matter that how some of the pesticides with poor performance in cotton fields are recommended in the official ‘awareness’ campaign.
The decision to form the committee was taken in the meeting of the cotton crop working group held here on Wednesday with provincial agriculture secretary Arif Nadeem in the chair. Besides officials of the agriculture department, representatives of various stakeholders of cotton market, including farmers, were also present in the meeting.
The chief of directorate of pest warning and quality control of pesticides, Dr Ijaz Pervez, will head the thee-member committee mandated to report on the issue within three days.
Sources present in the meeting told Dawn that as the proceedings started, the growers’ representatives blasted the pesticides being recommended by the provincial agriculture department in its extensive media campaign launched to what agriculture department’s information wing claims “guide the cotton growers”.
The growers’ representatives mostly complained against two pesticides, one being marketed by a multinational firm and the other by a national. Their claim was endorsed by department’s field staff present on the occasion.
It may be added here that both the pesticides were promoted by the agriculture department as panacea to many ills of cotton crop. Initially, it recommended only four pesticides but added four others after protest by some of the pesticides firms.
In Wednesday’s meeting, representatives of pesticides firms again raised the matter of recommending only a select number of pesticides in the official awareness campaign when there were several other registered pesticides available in the market with better results.
“If the government wants to promote only a few products, importers/distributors of other products of the same family be asked to not invest in the business,” the representative of a firm said.
Sources said the CCWG decided to delist the product of a multinational firm from the official awareness campaign to re-evaluate its efficacy.
It may be mentioned here that the agriculture department had started recommending the product of the national firm even before its formal launch for the first time this year.