Selling grand ideas

Khyber Pukhtunkhwa minister for agriculture and livestock Mohibullah Khan, while presiding over a review meeting on research activities at the Agriculture Research Institute of Tarnab, claimed that 16 research centers are fully functional in the province which have evolved and introduced 363 high yield varieties of cereal crops, vegetables and fruits. It reminds about the famous saying of Dr. Adam Smith, father of classical school of economic thoughts. “If wishes were horses beggars may have ridden on them all the time.”

The institutes of agriculture research are redundant and dysfunctional because of dearth of funds, shortage of chemicals, equipments and above all the chronic problem of power outages in the areas where majority of these centers are located. Neither the previous PTI government in the province nor the incumbent one bothered to provide solar systems to the centers of agriculture research and overcome the shortage of equipments and chemicals. In practice the research centers provide the hybrid seeds and fruits’ plants saplings which are being evolved at the Agriculture Research Center of Faisalabad.

If an agriculture scientists succeeds in evolving new variety of cereal crops and fruits against all odds his efforts go waste. The research of Dr.Zarqueraish was not utilised which produced high yield canola seed and olive plants in addition to feasibility of grafting the wild olive plantation that exist in certain areas of Malakand Division. The province is dependent on Punjab for the supply food grains, vegetable and fruits. Its 1.8 million acre fertile cultivable land in the southern districts is rain-fed. It can be put on the road to food autarky only when the centers of agriculture research are made fully functional and water conservation is done by giving priority to the construction of small dams. Grand ideas are no substitute for concrete actions.

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