Islamabad: Foreign delegates from Italy, Greece and Tunisia stressed to follow either mitigation or adaptation strategy to overcome the climate change by adopting sustainable and innovative water saving approaches and plans & polices and said, “avoid the unmanageable and manage the unavoidable.” They further urged, “One must be reactive to the past, proactive to the present and predictive as well as preemptive to the future” and recommended to adopt the new technologies instead of traditional ways to manage the water resources more efficiently.
Speakers stated this while addressing at the concluding ceremony of the international conference on Training and Capacity Building in Sustainable Agricultural Water Management to Address Food Security and Social Instability in Pakistan at Pir Mehr Ali Shah Arid Agriculture University Rawalpindi (PMAS-AAUR), here on Saturday .
The international conference was organized upon successful completion of Pak-Italian Joint Project funded by Italian Agency for Development Cooperation (AICS). Representatives of the AICS Dr. Pipi and Dr. Sertoli also participated in the conference and hoped that that Italian cooperation will assist Pakistan Agriculture to develop new scenarios to address food security and social instability in Pakistan.
While addressing as a chief guest, Dr Yusuf Zafar, Chairman Pakistan Agricultural Research Council (PARC) said that Pakistan has not the issue of production or distribution of resources instead of governance and management. He said our agriculture production is in surplus this year all because of our research and educational institutes, despite the fact that agriculture sector has investment of 0.18% from GDP. He said Pakistan has National Food Security Policy first time in the history with the aim to achieve Zero hunger and Sustainable Development Goal by 2030. He was in view that, “Any region of the world getting more than one thousand milliliters of rain can never be water scare country.” He said Pakistan has the potential as our 65% population is comprised of young generation also have the capacity to meet the future challenges of country and hoped they would play role for the food security as well as water management to get rid of all social instabilities in Pakistan.