SIX Muslim states have come together to increase their food and livestock production.. Pakistan, Indonesia, Bangla-desh, Malaysia, Turkey and Iran were amongst the countries that met at the prime ministerial level at Kuala Lumpur when the world prices of food were at the highest and oil had touched over $140 a barrel.

Among them are some of the most populated countries like Pakistan, Bangladesh and Indonesia.

The Muslim world has rich soil as well as deserts of Africa and the Middle East and of Iran and Pakistan. What they need is water and above all making the most productive and economic use of that water particularly in areas where it is scarce..

For this, the experiments in modern agriculture in developed countries can be useful. My first exposure to modern farming in Britain was fifty years earlier. You turned one knob and you got water, another knob at the same point gave you fertilised liquid and turning a third knob brought in pesticides.

This is what capital can do for farming. If we had that kind of money and investment, our farms would have produced wonders, A few years later I went to China as its agricultural reforms were under way. There, the farmers had run the canals underground, saving ten per cent of the land for cultivation. An old lady told me since the reform she had neither seen starvation nor hunger.

In Australia, where technology has brought power into the snowy mountains, a small quantity of water was pumped one way producing power and pumped the other way to produce more power. Queen Elizabeth was so impressed by the technology, she spent three days studying it.

Then in the Queensland experimental farm in New Zealand , all kinds of agricultural experiments were conducted , making the impossible possible and producing wealth through scientific experinments.

In the US , I saw there were no villages of the European or Asian type. The same is the case in Canada where waste lands are available for cultivation. Instead of seeking the safety of the villagers, the farmers sought safety through trucks and guns and carried their produce to the market. That is only possible where vast lands are available like the US and Canada.

Back home via Hawai, I drove through the Hawaiian pineapple farms with its big fruits and small leaves whereas in East Pakistan, there were long leaves and small pineapples.

A few years later, I was in Japan studying how they were producing a wonderful fruit of uniform size and weight. The secretary, economic affairs, government of Pakistan who was with me said they produced far more fruit in the Punjab with less effort. I said let us count. It was found that this small farm yard had around 280 fruits whereas in the Punjab in the same area, only about 80 fruits were counted. It was scientific farming at its best and the fruit used to be presented to guests in fine packaging.

A visit to the Netherlands through the tulip gardens showed the beauty of the great farm.

They had dug the ground out of the sea and cultivated the flowers. I am told one of the Middle Eastern countries grows tulips, sends them to Holland for packaging and gets them back for sale and distribution.

We too are digging the sea to reclaim the land, but to erect hotels and restaurants and not to grow tulips or any other flowers.