However, there is no denying the fact that despite having a centre place in the country’s economy, agriculture sector could not become a vibrant sector like those of other developed and developing countries in terms of producing enough wheat, rice, cotton, pulses and dairy products.
But the landed gentry in Pakistan is thriving as there was no tax on agricultural income. There has always been a strong agriculture lobby in every government during the last 60 years which dictated its terms. The poor farmer, however, continued to suffer as he does not get adequate return of its products. The late international fame economist Dr Mehboob-ul-Haque used to say that Pakistan’s landed gentry earns about Rs600 billion annually but it does not pay even Rs10 billion as part of tax on its income.
Mixed growth trends
The agriculture growth has experienced mixed trends specially over the last six years. The country witnessed unprecedented drought during the first two years of the decade (2000-1 and 2001-2002) which resulted in contraction of agriculture value added. Hence it registered negative growth in these two years. In the following years (2002-03 and 2004-05), relatively better availability of irrigation water had a positive impact on overall agricultural growth and this sector exhibited modest to strong recovery.
The performance of the agriculture remained weak during 2005-06 because its crop sector particularly major crops could not perform up to the expectations. Growth in the agriculture sector registered a sharp recovery in 2006-07 and grew by 5 per cent as against the preceding year’s growth of 1.6 per cent. But there is no consistency in agriculture growth rate and it all depends on weather which invariably created problems and successive governments failed to achieve their targeted growth rates.
Pakistan government does not tire in taking pride to have an all time high 8 per cent GDP growth rate in 2005-06 which was in fact achieved due to 5 per cent growth in agriculture. Later, the GDP rate came down to 7 per cent in 2006-07 and the target now for the current financial year has been set at 7 per cent. There is consensus in official and unofficial quarters that the government needs to concentrate on food and livestock to have a better agriculture growth which would ultimately help achieve an improved over all GDP growth in the country.
The role of the research institutions in helping the increased growth rate by proposing crop patterns and by increasing the per acreage production is very important. Most of the land in Pakistan either had been abandoned or was facing waterlogging and salinity and needed the attention of the government. Major international agencies including the World Bank and the Asian Development Bank(ADB) are ready to further provide adequate financial assistance to hemp improve the overall agricultural productivity. But unfortunately, there is no coherent policy nor there was any coordination among the economic ministries to improve the agriculture sector.
Sustained growth rate
The government has been urged by the experts to achieve a sustained growth rate of 5-6 per cent in agriculture which is imperative to ensure a rapid growth in national income, macroeconomic stability, improvement in distributive justice and a reduction in poverty. This can be realised by exploiting the achieved potential of all the sub-sectors of agriculture, diversifying agricultural production towards high value crops, and conserving land and water resources.
It is also said that the improved factors that may contribute to higher agricultural growth include increased cultivated areas, enhanced cropping intensity, multiple cropping, augmented use of various agricultural inputs, technological change, and technical efficiency.
In Pakistan, the potential for allocating more land and water resources towards agriculture and or scope of further increase in cropping intensity is limited. Similarly, use of inputs like fertilisers and pesticides cannot be increased beyond certain limits and also because of national health and environment concerns. Therefore, Pakistan would have to depend more heavily on technological change and improvement of technical efficiency for the desired rapid agricultural growth.
A higher level of investment in agricultural research and development had been proposed by most of the national and international experts. The research system is poorly funded, ill-equipped, weak linked with international and national stakeholders, thinly staffed with mostly low capacity and unmotivated scientific manpower. It also lacks autonomy and generally mismanaged which needed to be taken into account very seriously if at all better agricultural output is required aimed at reducing poverty and improving the overall economy of the country.