By By Aftab Maken
Chairing a steering committee meeting of CMP-II, a Rs8.013 billion project for food security and productivity enhancement of small farmers in 1,012 villages, Federal Minister for Food and Agriculture Nazar Muhammad Gondal, with the consent of the committee, directed the project director to scale down the size of the project, a participant of the meeting told The News.
Confirming the reduction in the scope of the project, Joint Secretary (Planning) Seerat Ashgar said, “The Ministry has directed the project management to redesign the project as prioritised by the steering committee.”
The joint secretary further said; “The project has completed half of its life (in the third year of its initiation) but till now no change was visible in terms of the goals and targets that could be gauged through the monitoring report of the Planning Commission.”
Now the project will be executed only in 192 villages and has been divided into components and they have been prioritised as per availability of resources, confirmed Project Director Dr Amjad Rana when approached for comments on the latest development.
“We have selected 10 villages from each district of the country keeping in view the availability of resources from the Public Sector Development Programme (PSDP),” said Dr Rana.
The main objectives of the project were to supplement the country’s ongoing efforts to increase food production through enhancing crop productivity, ensure food security and alleviate poverty in rural areas through improving income of small farmers and build a mechanism for sustaining productivity enhancement and food security programme even after termination of the project.
As per PC-1 of the project, it was originally designed for launch in 1,012 villages of 27 districts of all the four provinces, Azad Jammu and Kashmir and the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (Fata). It would be a village-based community project for which a revolving fund was required for sustainability of activities by village organisations.
Quoting the federal minister for food and agriculture, another official said that the minister had reservations about the project and directed the project management to immediately stop the releases to the NGOs for social mobilisation and other outsourced portion of the project.
The monitoring units of the Planning Commission also raised questions about non-implementation of some of the components of the project like setting up village organisations (VOs), another official of the food ministry said.
“The focal point of the project was disbursement of concessional credits to the small farmers for enhancing their productivity and alleviation of poverty in the rural areas,” he added.
As per PC-1 of the project, funds will be available as loan to the VOs, 50 per cent of which will be recovered from them, in five equal annual installments starting from the sixth year of loan disbursement in order to create a sense of ownership among the farmers and district/provincial governments.
The remaining 50 per cent will remain with the VOs as government equity, which will be used for further sustaining the project activities and adoption of production technologies to continue the increase in farm productivity, it added.
The CMP-II, a project of food ministry, with an allocation of Rs8.013 billion with expenditure up to June 2009 was Rs1.977 billion and an allocation one billion rupees for 2009-10.