Agriculture entrepreneurship modules at village level help reverse rural-urban migration.

ISLAMABAD -- Developing agriculture entrepreneurship modules at village-level may not only control the rural-urban migration but also help reversing the trend.

The agriculture entrepreneurship at village level will create hundreds of thousands of jobs besides promoting culture of value addition to raw agri products which has the potential to boost the country's exports by 3-4 times.

'In order to embark upon the idea of agriculture value addition we are planning to develop entrepreneurship modules in research institutions where the people taking interest in this business would be offered such value added agriculture modules,' Chairman Pakistan Agriculture Research Council (PARC) Dr Muhammad Azeem Khan said.

Talking to reporter here, he said people who accept the offer would be given proper skill development training to make the modules successful.

Basically such small scale value addition initiatives could also be promoted with training and financial back up.

The PARC Chairman said the economic development of other Asian countries such as China and Korea, was driven by the fact that they had developed small scale value addition in houses at villages level.

'We are planning to copy the Chinese Tao Bao villages model under which 4000 villages have been recognized as Tao Bao vilalges,' he said while explaining, 'The concept of this model is that when 50 percent of the households of a particular village enter value addition business then that village is declared as a Tao Boa village and is linked with the market through e-commerce'.

He said in this regard, recently he also held a meeting with a Chinese delegation to seek further information about the model.

He informed that under this model, China had produced at least two million new job opportunities in those 4000 villages.

'So the concept is that in Pakistan also why every value addition clusters should be in the vicinity of big cities, why do not we plan to support this plan at village level,' he added.

With respect to current value addition situation in Pakistan, he lamented that in the country mostly raw material is exported which is nothing but wastage of the resources.

'A major portion of our fruits and vegetables are exported to the low end market because our first level value addition standards are not up to...

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