What ails Punjab's agriculture
In the pre-independence India, the Punjab province served as
the food basket for the country. The Punjab province of each
country still performs the same function but Pakistan's
province is doing it inefficiently in comparison with the
other side.
What ails the agriculture productivity of Pakistan's Punjab?
At the government level, the output of the two sides is never
compared although it is an ideal case for undertaking a study
because soil and weather conditions and the mettle of the
farmers are essentially the same quality and calibre. The
issue merit's the government's urgent attention because
therein seems to lie the ingredients for improving crop
productivity in Pakistan.
Statistics present a sorrowful picture of comparison. While
figures officially quoted in Pakistan are usually not
considered reliable by all quarters, there seems no reason to
distrust them in this case because productivity could hardly
be more dismal than its documented record in Pakistan.
Statistics from India have never been questioned or regarded
as tampered by any segment and the country, a genuine
democracy, can hardly hope to gain any advantage by cooked up
frames of progress; instead of offering a government a
political edge, fudged figures could create a mess.
Statistics from official documents of Pakistan have often
viewed as motivated by a desire to present a picture rosier
than the ugly and frightening ground reality and hence often
viewed as inaccurate and on the higher side in case of
productivity and lower when it comes to poverty and population
growth.
Two of the main cash crops of the two provinces are rice and
wheat. Pakistan's yields in both crops are far behind the
other Punjab. For instance, Indian Punjab has shown an annual
production growth rate of 11.03 per cent for rice while it has
been a mere 3.08 per cent for Punjab in Pakistan.
Indian Punjab produced 14.36 million tons of wheat in 1996- 98
from 3.3 million hectares while the output in Pakistan's
Punjab was 13.13 million tons from 5.9 million ha. Even in
other periods, productivity on the other side of Wahga has
been consistently higher.
As a result, the Indian state is following a policy of trying
to produce more from less land while in Pakistan, more land is
brought under cultivation every year to enhance the total
yield and meet domestic consumption needs. At the same time,
it is well known that Pakistan can ill afford to increase area
of cultivated land because of scarcity as also deteriorating
quality of water.
The difference between the productivity of the two sides
reflects sadly on the state of affairs in Pakistan's Punjab.
According to a study by three Pakistani and Indian experts,
"if India were to produce the same amount of rice with
Pakistan's productivity level, it would have to devote an
additional area of more than one million hectares under rice".
The picture of wheat is worse. Pakistan would have to bring an
area of about 'four million ha' to reach Indian Punjab's
produce. The experts ask the question why yields vary so much
under fairly similar 'agro-climatic, socio economic and
managerial conditions'?
Their analyses identify some of the factors contributing to
this discrepancy in productivity. They cite productivity
performance as partly caused by differences in input use and
cropping intensity but link it with the use of technology and
resource quality too.
Low productivity is not restricted to Punjab; farmers of Sindh
are equally afflicted with this problem though all the reasons
for low yields in the province do not follow Punjab's pattern.
Extensive irrigation has caused the water table to rise in
Sindh from a 'depth of 20-3 metre to 1-2 metren within the
last twenty years' and that has had a negative impact on
productivity.
In Pakistan, produce varies from farm to farm, indicating
inequity in the availability of resources to farmers. That
should read as big landowners usurping the share of small
farmers and their resources enabling them to apply the
required quantity of inputs to crops. Water efficiency in
Pakistan is higher in India.
Land is suffering a process of degradation in Pakistan. India
has countered the problem with 'widespread use of gypsum to
combat secondary salinity from tube well irrigation' by
providing gypsum at subsidized rates to states facing
salinity. Am organization has been established for this
purpose. Pakistan has not undertaken any such measure. The
result is rapid degradation of land contributing towards a
decline in productivity.
One of the reasons for low produce of rice is Pakistan's
emphasis on low yielding high value Basmati rice while India
cultivates early maturing coarse rice. This causes delays in
sowing of wheat in areas of rice-wheat regime. Basmati rice is
a foreign exchange earning commodity but it has become a case
of earning from one source and squandering assets as a
consequence.
Basmati rice is harvested late and that automatically delays
wheat cultivation in Basmati-rice areas. This is reflected in
quantity of wheat yield. Delayed cultivation of wheat means a
1 to 1.5 per cent daily decline in the yield if the crop is
sown after the cut-off date for sowing.
The experts have not taken the impact of sugar-cane on wheat
because that too is an important factor in the delay of wheat
cultivation. Problems of sugar millers are costing a lot in
wheat output. Needless to point out that wheat sowing is
completed in time in the Indian Punjab.
It is time the government started seriously investigating and
identifying factors causing low productivity of the
agriculture sector of Pakistan. The measures announced in the
Budget for 2004-05 suggest that the authorities are concerned
but they are hardly backed by appropriate policies. High
allocations are welcome but the money has to be invested in
the right fields, not scattered all over to demonstrate the
importance attached to the agriculture sector.
Curtesy: The Dawn
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Pakissan.com;
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