The Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) will soon initiate projects to improve soil quality in areas with saline and water-logged soils, FAO country representative Dr Kevin Gallagher said on Monday.
He was speaking at the inaugural session of a two-day conference on Saline Agriculture: Fighting Hunger and Poverty in Southern Punjab at the Abbasia Campus of the Islamia University of Bahawalpur.
The conference has been organised jointly by the IUB and the Soil Salinity Research Station, Rahim Yar Khan. Representative of FAO (FAO), agriculture scientists and government officials will be in attendance.
Dr Gallagher said most of these projects would be implemented in southern districts of the Punjab. He said salinity and water scarcity were global issues and needed to be tackled through joint research initiatives by agriculture experts. “We can help fight poverty and malnourishment by finding ways to make saline and water-logged soils cultivable,” he said. He added that intelligent water and pesticide management were also important in making farming more sustainable.
Earlier IUB Vice Chancellor Prof Muhammad Mukhtar said given the favourable climate and fertile soil, Bahawalpur farmers only needed familiarity and access to modern techniques to improve crop yields.
He said Bahawalpur had once used to be known as “granary” of the sub-continent.
The vice chancellor said research in sustainable agricultural practices had been helped with the recent establishment of University College of Agriculture and Environmental Sciences at the IUB. He said the researchers at the college had recently developed a new variety of cotton, named IUB-222.
He said about 60 million hectares was currently affected in the region by salinity and hoped that the figure would be brought down through use of modern techniques.
He sought assistance in this regard from agriculture experts and promised to recruit those interested in working with the university as adjunct faculty. The IUB would soon arrange a Kissan Mela which would hopefully turn into an annual meeting of farmers and agriculture experts to discuss issues of concern, he added.
Others speakers at the session included Agriculture Department Director General Dr Noorul Islam, Pakistan Chamber of Agriculture Chairman Faqir Nusrat Hussain, Dr Shahzada Mehdi Munawar and Dr Zahoor Ahmed and Prof Dr Muhammad Ishfaq of the Faisalabad University of Agriculture.
Published in The Express Tribune, April 11th, 2012.
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