Faisalabad - stuck in a fossilised groove.

Byline: Ahmad Fraz Khan

If proof is needed for under-utilisation, ineffectiveness, irrelevance or even failure of agriculture institutions, the district of Faisalabad provides it. Having four internationally-acclaimed institutions in its precinct for more than a century, its agricultural pattern and productivity are still fossilised and its performance is as good, or as bad, as that of any other bad-performing district in Punjab - including the remotest one like Rajanpur.

If taken out of performance context, the names and history of these institutions are imposing. The Punjab Agricultural College and Research Institute, Lyallpur, that later morphed into a university has been there since 1906. When education and research divorced each other in 1962, the college became a university and the Ayub Research Center was born with researchers stuffed in it to lead the green revolution.

A decade later (1972), the Nuclear Institute for Agriculture and Biology (Niab) was established. In 1994, the National Institute for Biotechnology and Genetic Engineering (NIBGE) followed. The university and Ayub Research Center have around 45 independent sub-institutes for specified research. The agriculture picture, however, remains the same, if not worse.

While these institutions are not devoted to improving Faisalabad's agriculture alone, however, their proximity has not worked in the favour of farming and farmers. The productivity lags behind even the provincial average and the pattern and is restricted to an archaic five-major template. Both factors stand witness to how these institutions failed to educate farmers in their neighbourhoods with their utility remaining a question mark.

The Punjab Crop Reporting Service documents how five crops - wheat, cotton, sugarcane, rice and maize - hog the district's lands. When one of the crop's production declines, as is the case with cotton, the other four divide the area among themselves rather than making way for other high-value options and breaking the decades' old pattern.

Despite the proximity of several agricultural institutions, the productivity averages of the district are below that of provincial numbers for almost all of its major crops of wheat, cotton, sugarcane, rice and maize

The average productivity data only lends credence to the claim. In 2014-15, when the provincial average of cotton stood at 23 maunds per acre, Faisalabad produced at the rate of 17.19 maunds. Next year, the provincial average dropped to...