PAKISTAN has reached a stage where it has become immensely difficult for the country to settle its debts. As the country’s crisis-hit economy struggles to steady itself, the question on everyone’s mind is: how long can we continue like this? The simple answer is, we cannot. There seems to be some understanding among Pakistani rulers that we cannot continue to draw unproductive loans as we have over the past 50 years, and a strategy reset is needed. But will the newly constituted Special Investment Facilitation Council (SIFC) — their answer to the challenges being faced — deliver, and how will it be different from past such ventures?

The critics of the SIFC point out that such institutional arrangements have not worked out in the past and are unlikely to work this time as well. On the other hand, those defending the SIFC believe its unique structure and the prominent role of the army chief within it will help it avoid the fate of past institutions. History is not destiny, and there is little that will prevent the SIFC from delivering except its oversight committee’s failure to learn from past mistakes. Its members should keep in mind that a lot is riding on the SIFC’s shoulders at this point and Pakistan cannot afford any failure at this critical juncture.

Among the identified sectors that the SIFC wishes to oversee, agriculture and livestock are the most important and also the most difficult to properly manage. In the post-flood conference in Geneva last year, the international community had committed more than what Pakistan was asking for. But, at the end of the day, investors — be they international financial institutions or sheikhs from the Gulf states — require smart, implementable and viable projects to put their money in. This is where we fail. We have a bureaucracy which is generalist by training and does not have any core competency in any discipline of the economy. Therefore, bureaucrats alone cannot identify projects which can take us out of the quagmire we are in. The SIFC must avoid this deadwood as it goes about planning its interventions.

City-dwelling business gurus and policy experts, too, do not always understand the needs of the people operating for generations in the sector, but still feel they can ‘teach’ farmers what they ought to be doing. And, if farmers are not quick or willing to learn from these ‘experts’, their advocated solution is to push for corporate farming. However, this approach has not worked for Pakistan in the past 40 years and is unlikely to work again. The SIFC’s policymakers and implementers should realise that agriculture and farming, like any other economic sector, is a knowledge-based enterprise. The SIFC must include competent and bold sector advisers who understand the nuances of Pakistan’s agri economy, and who can identify and advise on projects which will serve the sector and investors based on ground realities.

Investors want smart and viable projects.

SIFC should also go back to the drawing board and add the water sector, especially irrigation, to its priority areas. Pakistani policymakers must realise that the country is not only an agricultural country, it is essentially an irrigation economy. We need private investment, including from the Gulf states, in the water sector as the country does not have the fiscal space to invest public funds in water.

We cannot develop and will not be able to discard the begging bowl without finding new options, including blended finance, for investing in our water resources. The other change the SIFC should consider is to give power to local investors and communities to identify projects which can help serve the sector and the country.

As students of economic development, the first lesson we are taught is that a project can be identified by two kinds of people: its beneficiaries, or experts in that particular sector. If we follow this philosophy, a farmers’ group should be considered just as capable of recommending a project which can help remove a major development constraint in their operating area. As we are talking on a national scale and with an institution like the SIFC involved, this project will, of course, have to be of sufficiently large scope and strategic in nature if it is to be accepted by the relevant people, including interested investing parties.

Say, for example, that a farmers’ consortium in Sindh identifies a ‘Sukkur Barrage Area Agricultural Modernisation and Processing Project’. As Sindh does not have a proper drainage system in place and this is one of its largest development constraints, this kind of project, and follow-up investments in processing plants for local producers, can result in massive efficiency gains, which can be sold to investor countries as a means of improving their own food security.

The writer is a former secretary, forests, and a hands-on farmer.

Published in Dawn, October 12th, 2023