‘Climate-smart agriculture needed for food security’

ISLAMABAD: Pakistan needs to acquire climate-smart agriculture (CSA) practices to ensure food security in the country, and also to improve climate resilience, a moot was told on Tuesday.

Pakistan Institute of Parliamentary Services (PIPS), in collaboration with Syngenta Pakistan, organised the high-powered policy dialogue titled ‘Climate-Smart Agriculture and Food Security: Challenges & Way Forward for Pakistan’, with objectives of highlighting the key challenges facing the food security of the country and identifying viable solutions to mitigate the challenges in the context of climate change.

The session brought together key stakeholders from public, private, development and academic sectors including members of the parliament, and representatives from UN FAO, ADB, PMAS Arid Agriculture University Rawalpindi and Quaid-e-Azam University Islamabad. They stressed a need for a collective action plan to deal with the rising food insecurity and to promote climate smart and regenerative agriculture in the country to counter the impacts of climate change.

“Pakistan has become highly vulnerable to climate change, and not because of our own doing, which is manifested in the form of recent super floods that wreaked havoc on our agriculture,” chief guest of the session Speaker National Assembly Raja Pervaiz Ashraf said.

He added that it’s essential to protect the agriculture sector against climatic shifts, and utilise sustainable practices to improve the country’s climate resilience. “We are at the turning point of our history. It is through persistence and resilience that we will overcome all the changes that our nation is currently facing.”

Senator Seemi Ezdi (chairperson Senate’s standing committee on climate change) was of the view that women in agriculture have an important role to play in ensuring the food security of the country.

“Most of the labor force in the agriculture sector constitutes of women workers. It also is an indication of promoting more female farmers who are equipped with the latest technologies for dealing with climate change and productivity issues,” she said.