The Punjab government will spend Rs 3.89 billion during current fiscal year to attain food autarky.
Official sources said 31 schemes including 13 ongoing and 18 new projects completed for this purpose. They added that Punjab was considered Pakistan’s food basket and that a number of comprehensive steps were being taken to promote the agricultural sector.
These steps, they added, included food security and promotion of exportable high value crops through improved techniques, revamping the marketing system and averting losses from insects, pests, weeds, alkalinity, and salinity.
In the ongoing schemes the main emphasis would be on innovative technologies to enhance vertical crop productivity, increasing farmers’ income through increased crop productivity, better support prices, efficient water supply through improved watercourses and land leveling, horticulture by encouraging the private sector, exploring energy sources, minimizing reliance on oil seeds import by boosting local production, efficient market infrastructure to ensure optimal value addition and strengthening research-extension farmer linkage.
Under the government’s strategic interventions, the promotion of cotton in Thal would be ensured through pressurised irrigation, marketing rice transplanting through service providers to achieve optimal plant population per acre, eradication of poverty through distribution of house-cum-gardening plots on lease, basis in Southern Punjab and kitchen gardening in big towns to overcome high vegetable prices.