Agriculture sector: a declining performance.

Byline: Nazir Ahmed Shaikh

Agriculture sector have a great role in the economic development and prosperity of Pakistan. In the early time, it is considered to be a dominant sector but due to the political, social, environmental and climate conditions its production yield is continuously going down. The rural transformation pace remained very slow resulted in problems like food insecurity, poverty, unemployment, illiteracy etc. It is very important that focus should remain on raising food production through efficient irrigation and innovative technology, agriculture diversification, agriculture support services, etc.

The macroeconomic stability is a fundamental pre-requisite for sustained economic growth. The country's inability to achieve sustained and rapid economic growth is due to structural issues which require effective monetary and fiscal measures to achieve macroeconomic stability.

The outgoing five-year plan has seen an average growth of 4.7% against the target of 5.4%. It has also witnessed a subdued growth of 3.29% against the ambitious target of 6.2%. The target was based upon sectoral growth projections for agriculture sector at 3.8%. However, the actual sectoral growth turned out to be 0.85%.

Some of the major crops witnessed negative growth as production of cotton, rice and sugarcane declined by 17.5%, 3.3% and 19.4% respectively. The crops showing positive growth include wheat and maize which grew at the rate of 0.5% and 6.9% respectively. Other crops have shown growth of 1.95% mainly due to increase in production of pulses and oilseeds. Cotton ginning declined by 12.74% due to a decline in production of cotton crop. Livestock sector has shown a growth of 4.0%. The growth recorded for the forestry is 6.47% which was mainly due to increase in production of timber in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa ranging from 26.7 to 36.1 thousand cubic meters.

The provisional GDP growth rate for FY2019 is estimated at 3.29% on the basis of 0.85, 1.40 and 4.71% growth in agricultural, industrial and services sectors respectively. The provisional agriculture sector growth is estimated at 0.85%. The crops sector has witnessed negative growth of 4.4% during FY2019 mainly due to negative growth of 6.6% of important crops. Production of cotton, rice and sugarcane declined by 17.5, 3.3 and 19.4%, respectively, while the wheat output posted a marginal growth of 0.5 % and production of maize grew by 6.9%. Other crops have shown growth of 1.95% mainly because of increase in production of pulses and oil seeds.

The poor performance of agriculture sector is due to reduction in the area of cultivation...