|
Agriculture university can suggest remedies for poverty reduction
FAISALABAD (December 24 2002) : The University of Agriculture, Faisalabad, can provide an intellectual platform to identify the problems and suggest viable remedies for poverty alleviation and sustainable development in developing Asian countries.
This was stated by the Advisor ,Comstech, and Chairman, National Commission on Biotechnology (NoB), Dr Anwar Nasim, while addressing the concluding session of the six-day seminar on afforestation and forest management in the university here.
He said that the Comstech and National Productivity Organisation (NRC)), Pakistan, were targeting the same challenges.
Dr Anwar appreciated the idea of developing productivity villages as a tool for poverty alleviation, and said that the NCB was also targeting poverty by establishing bio-villages where biotechnology would be used to enhance productivity.
He said that for the last two to three years efforts had been intensified at the national level to strengthen the science and technology for which sufficient funds had been provided.
He said the NCB was also set up as a part of the efforts to use science and technology for the redressal of problems being confronted by the masses.
Dr Nasim said that agriculture enjoyed highest priority in healing the national economy and "we must exploit its full potential by realigning our agricultural policies," he said.
Repeating his demand to declare Faisalabad as "Science City" of Pakistan, he said that it had a number of scientific research institutions in addition to the University of Agriculture.
He said that the Agriculture University here had the largest number of Ph.D scholars, who could put agriculture on right track by interlinking it with result-oriented search.
He said the university could play a modest but leading role in solving the problems being confronted by the agriculture sector.
Professor Dr Riaz Hussain Qureshi, vice-chancellor of the university, appreciated the topic of the seminar, and said that it was most important for us as Pakistan was confronted with problems of water-logging, salinity and pollution.
He said that the university was the right platform to discuss, identify issues and evolve an action plan, which could be followed by the member countries for afforestation and sustainable forest management
He also endorsed the idea of collaboration with the Agriculture University and Thai universities for extensive research on forest.
He also appreciated the issue of establishing the productivity villages, and said that the university would like to play its role in poverty alleviation.
Earlier, Dr Saeed said that seven APO countries participated in this seminar in which seven presentations were made with elaborate discussion the topic.
He said that the trust area of the seminar was sustainable agriculture, food processing and marketing and poverty alleviation.
He said that seven resource persons delivered lectures covering all aspects of the
afforestation. Later, certificates, prizes and shields were also presented to the participants and resource persons.
Courtesy Business Recorder
|
Pakissan.com; Advisory Point
|
