By Ahmad Fraz Khan
AGRICULTURE research is fast becoming a
forlorn subject. This is in spite of the fact it had helped multiply yield of
almost all major crops that not only ensure food security but promote
industrialisation.
Over the past six decades, wheat yield has surged by almost five times,
cotton seven times and rice six times.
Despite all these, research is on a low priority list of the government,
receiving meagre budgetary allocations.
The empowered provinces now have an opportunity to reorient the entire
system to enhance productivity and make Pakistani agriculture produce globally
competitive.
According to a World Bank study better research had been adding three
per cent to world productivity since 1971. Local scientists insist that with
better research agriculture has a potential to grow at six to eight per cent
annually against the current two to three per cent.
Investment on agriculture research improves benefits and rate of
economic return. Often a small breakthrough in any of the crop could immensely
directly benefit both farmers through increased output and urban consumers
through price reduction. This simple fact should make research the most
deserving sector of official money, attention and planning. Most of scientists
and economists also agree that the rate of economic returns on agriculture
research is the highest as compared to most other sectors. The global
investment in research has a rate of return of 41 per cent. In Pakistan, where
agriculture is under-performing, the return should be much higher.
As things stand, Pakistan invests only 0.25 per cent of its agriculture
output on research. The funds hardly meet administrative charges of these
so-called research organisations, leaving small sums, or nothing for actual
research.
Even India and Bangladesh are spending 0.45 per cent (almost double the
given size of its agriculture economy) and 0.35 per cent respectively. The
developed world manages three to four per cent.
In Pakistan, agriculture research (read innovation system), as
scientists see it, has developed some inherent problems which mainly are:
little and inappropriate investment on it, lack of coordinated planning,
monitoring and evaluation, focus on routine rather than problem-solving, and
little commercialisation of research outputs.
Owing to these constraints, the rate of innovation in this sector has
slowed down for the last few decades, turning the entire agriculture sector
non-competitive in international markets.
To begin with, agriculture planning cannot be compartmentalised, as has
traditionally been the case. The sheer spread of institutions (universities,
research organisations, official extension wings), private businesses,
commercial activities and industrialisation in the field have brought it to a
point where each segment has to cooperate and integrate to deliver.
On the second stage, research has to be need-based, rather than an
academic pursuit. In the years to come, Pakistan would have bigger challenges
emerging for its agriculture. The biggest of all would be the climatic change,
which would need totally a new set of technology, agronomy, planning and
practices.
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