Constraints in agriculture research and innovation, lack of coordinated planning, monitoring and evaluation, inappropriate investment in research projects, focus on routine research rather than problem solving approach and little commercialisation of research output are among the major hurdles in agriculture development in the country. These observations were made by the Punjab Agricultural Research Board (PARB) Chief Executive Dr Mubarik Ali. He was addressing the members of the Farmer Associates Pakistan (FAP) at FAP Executive Committee meeting here on Monday. The meeting was held under the chairmanship of FAP Director Sultan Hameed. PARB Chief Executive Dr Mubarik Ali highlighted that the role of research and innovation in instigating sustainable growth in the agriculture sector and economic uplifting of rural communities in the Punjab province. Quoting a World Bank research, he said that innovation system in the province had contributed about half of the overall three per cent growth in the agriculture sector since 1971, whereas in monetary terms, its contribution stood billions of dollars.
He said that lack in agriculture research and innovation had badly affected the agriculture growth during recent decade, which resulted in increased production – and marketing-costs and turned the sector uncompetitive in international markets. He pointed out that the PARB was created to overcome some of these constraints, but unless private sector like FAP, politicians and government take keen interest in boosting the solution-based research and innovation system in the province, the agriculture sector will continue growing at 2-3 per cent instead of its potential of 6-8% annual growth. He told FAP that farmers, being the main beneficiaries of the solution-based innovations, should demonstrate their concerns on its plight and demand appropriate investment to resolve its constraints.
While explaining the achievements of PARB, Dr. Mubarik Ali informed that within a span of just 2 and a half year, 53 solution-based research projects in crops and livestock sectors have been operationalized costing less than Rs. 200 million a year. Unless these projects reaches to 200 and annual investment on solution-based research reaches to Rs. one billion along with Rs. 2 billion a year subsidy to promote these innovations to the stakeholders, the high growth targets in the agriculture sector cannot be achieved. Without such investment, farmers will continue achieving low yields, their incomes will remain abysmale and Pakistan will continue loosing competitiveness in international markets. Discussing the crop wise projects in details he informed that 8 projects on wheat , 6 on cotton, 4 on rice, 3 on sugarcane, 4 on vegetable, 7 on fruits, 11 on livestock and 6 miscellaneous projects are in operation under PARB, which attempts to resolve major issues like CLCV in cotton, BLB in rice, stem rust in wheat, drought, salinity, frost, & cold tolerance in various crops, and specify Standard Operating Procedures (SOP) for disease free and economically-viable seedling in potato, olive and date palm. Few projects have completed their research phase and research products from these are now being commercialized. These include SOP for direct seeding, Controlled atmosphere technology for mango, pepper, and apple for long distance haulage, indigenous skin-coating material, indigebous material for protecting wheat in storage, drought tolerant wheat, protecting wheat from aphid, etc.