approaches should be tailored in a manner that benefit the farmers. Domestic agricultural markets should be revamped and to make them efficient the role of middleman should be eliminated, he said.
At the same time, he said, the state should maintain strategic food and water reserves.
Another farmer Mian Obaidullah said there are numerous countries that produce 10 times more corn, two times more rice and wheat per hectare and three times more beef per animal.
“We need a strategy that strengthens the entire food economy,” he said, adding a realistic agricultural strategy discourages cultivation of crops that do not suit the local environment.
Sugarcane, he said, is one such crop where Pakistan cannot achieve the global productivity, as it is the crop that grows in tropics.
To be effective, the agricultural policies should facilitate end-to-end value-chain development. It should ensure not only promoting the right inputs, but also encourage creative business models to enable low-interest financing and risk sharing, he added.
Market analyst Amina Usman said the government should formulate an international trade and investment strategy that can help hedge against volatility and food shortages.
This would also spur economic growth, she said, adding, the ease of import and export of agricultural commodities is one way of integrating agriculture with the global trade.
Pakistan could become a hub for Halal food processing just like Singapore that has to import and process food products and earns huge foreign exchange from the value-added exports, she said.
“We might not have to import any food as chicken, meat, beef and fruits are abundantly available in Pakistan,” she said, adding the Pakistan government simply has to ensure that all food safety standards the importers require are practiced by the food processors.
She regretted domestic market is not efficient in Pakistan, the route from farm to table is long, complex, and subject to disruption. She said each bottleneck to market is an implicit tax on farmer and consumers.
She said despite throwing 35 million acres feet of water in sea, the planners in Pakistan have failed to construct a single large water reservoir in the last 40 years. Pakistan, she said, is now classified among water starved country.
Inadequate storage facilities result in massive food waste and poorly timed or unpredictable usage of food reserves has skew prices in the past, she added.