HYDERABAD: The Sindh Abadgar Board has urged government to establish a climate change endowment fund to respond to extreme weather events and offer assets of Sindh Seed Cooperation to private sector for better seed development.

The meeting, chaired by SAB president Syed Mahmood Nawaz Shah here on Sunday, focused on upcoming federal budget and last year’s performance of agriculture sector and noted that Pakistan benefited from additional production of cotton, paddy and wheat.

It said that although GDP growth this year was being led by agriculture sector growers, however, suffered challenges, including rising cost of inputs, decline in electricity availability, climate change and drop in commodity prices.

It proposed that climate change endowment fund would respond to extreme weather events that caused losses to crops and livestock. Input prices continued to rise and it seemed commodity prices were being suppressed by different means like export curbs, extensive imports etc, said the meeting.

It said that last year, prices of most of major commodities of Pakistan including cotton, oilseeds and wheat remained suppressed from previous to last year. Minimum cotton price was notified at Rs8,500 per 40kg but growers received only Rs5,200 per 40kg. On the other hand prices of urea, being the largest used fertiliser, rose from Rs1,700 to Rs4,600 in three years, said the meeting.

Not only this but growers paid Rs5,500 for urea last year due to black-marketing. The government should announce controlling prices of inputs which would help increased production of commodities.

The meeting said that horticultural production and processing hubs, clusters needed to be created in areas where horticultural products were available in abundance and these areas needed to be backed by incentives including that of provision of electricity, subsidized credit, etc. These areas with feasibility of value-added products could be offered to investors for exports, it proposed.

In addition to it, establishment of laboratories for pesticide testing, reducing processing times at seaports and airports for exporting perishable commodities, reforming department of plant protection were key measures for enhancing horticultural exports from Pakistan, it said.

The meeting said that loans of small and medium sized growers should be ensured and its premium should be borne by the government, which would reduce risk of banks to loan small scale farmers and protect small farmers against crop losses.

It said that Pakistan’s seed landscape was not encouraging and would hence require federal investment in biotechnology so that seeds specific to Pakistani conditions were developed.

Currently, most seeds being used were not indigenous as the Sindh Seed Corporation with 6,000 acres of land was running in loss and not able to perform its function, it said.

The meeting recommended that SSC assets should be leveraged and offered to private sector for public private or private sector seed development.

It said that smart agricultural technologies were very critical and the technologies such as satellite imagery, remote sensing, smart sensors and nodes, smart weather stations had cross cutting efficient applications. These included climate risk mitigation, on-farm information, pest and disease predictions, water accumulation and drought conditions, flooding, reliable information for banks to provide credit and recover loan through field information and much more, it said.

The meeting was attended by Dr Zulfiqar Yousfani, Dr Bashir Nizamani, Mohammad Aslam Mari, Imran Bozdar, Taha Memon, Arbab Ahsan, Malik Nizamani, Khalid Memon and others.

Published in Dawn, June 3rd, 2024