THE official claim of achieving food security within a few years contradicts ground realities. The agriculture sector suffers from multiple crises. It regularly misses officially fixed yield and acreage targets, and the yield per acre is going down. The failure to build new water reservoirs – the most essential factor for farm production – and rising input prices, make it impossible to achieve food security ..

Take these factors in the context of administrative failure to contain smuggling of agriculture produce, as domestic prices are suppressed, the overall picture of food security gets bleaker. The government is yet to elaborate its plans to get out of the current food crisis, and allocate matching human and fiscal resources to deal with the factors afflicting the agriculture sector that make food security a distant dream.

Beyond administrative control, the government needs either to help enhance per acre yield or increase acreage, as it has been doing for the last 50 years, to attain food security. But, the trend has now hit the law of diminishing return. The ever-increasing water shortages have made it impossible to bring more area under cultivation. Pakistan still has 22 million acres, known as cultivable waste that can be brought under cultivation to help attain food security. Punjab alone has over four million acres of such land, Balochistan over nine million acres and Sindh 3.5 million acres. It means the country has been unable, or unwilling, to use around 40 per cent of its land resources.

It is also tragic that the cultivable waste is increasing; it stood at 21.86 million acres in 1990 and rose to 22 million acres in 2005. In such circumstances, how the government plans to deal with food security is any body’s guess.

Not only cultivable waste is increasing; the cultivated area is also decreasing, owing to unplanned development of cities. All major cities have spread on cultivable lands around them. Cultivated lands figure, which stood at 55 million acres in 2001, dropped by one million acres by 2006.

Any attempt to increase acreage should start with creating water resources and controlling prices of input. Unfortunately, this is the most neglected area for the last 35 years. The country has already lost 28 per cent of storage capacity whereas it should have added 245 per cent of it to its present capacity; the policy makers had agreed to develop water resources by seven per cent in the post-Tarbella scenario.

In quantitative terms, that means adding a five million acre feet dam every seven year. By that calculation, the country should have built five such dams and must have been in the process of building the sixth one now. Instead, it has lost 28 per cent of the present capacity. .

The water poverty has not only put a lid on usage of new lands but also working as a huge constraint on the efficient usage of existing ones. The country suffers 22 to 25 per cent water shortage every Rabi even if both the dams are filled, which is a rarity in itself. This shortage is reflected in almost all crops.

During the last Rabi, when the shortage was around 28 per cent, the country lost around 2.4 million tons of wheat – the production dropped to 21.6 million tons against target of 24 million tons. This quantity is now being imported at the cost of billions of rupees. Water was one of the major reasons behind the crisis. It was not only Rabi, Kharif crops also suffered and almost 2.5 million bales of cotton were lost to water crisis.

There is hardly any credible way of achieving food security without first creating water resources, where the current government has not only failed, but has dropped Kalabagh dam, without taking the nation (parliament) into confidence. Diamer-Bhasha Dam is still a distant prospect.

If water crisis has hobbled land usage to its present level, the ever-increasing prices of inputs would only ensure that neither farmers make optimum usage of current land resources nor dare to bring additional land under cultivation. The prices of fertiliser, farm implements and pesticides are increasing almost every month. A tractor, which cost Rs3,50,000 last year, is now being sold at Rs4,50,000. The price of phosphatic fertiliser has multiplied by three times in the last one year – from Rs950 in last March to Rs3,600 per bag this July. Pesticides prices have gone up by 25 to 30 per cent during the last three months and the farmers are expected to pay Rs28 billion for the same quantity of pesticides, they bought last year for Rs15 billion.

The horizontal expansion in land usage was stopped almost a decade ago because of water stress. The inputs prices were not a factor at that time. With most of inputs spiraling out of farmers’ fiscal reach, the land usage is bound to come under further pressure and so would be food security.