Large landholdings divided into small family units

Biggest hurdle to transforming agriculture removed: Husain.

KARACHI:

Institute of Business Administration (IBA) Karachi Director Dr Ishrat Husain has said large landholding in Pakistan is not the biggest hurdle in the way of transforming the agriculture sector like it was a few decades ago.

Large landholdings have now been divided into smaller family units according to heredity laws, he said while speaking at the Sindh Board of Investment (SBI) here on Tuesday. On the occasion, SBI and IBA signed an agreement on training of graduates.

“Infrastructure from farm to market is extremely inefficient and eats up around 40% of the total farm produce. Even if the country reduces this wastage by 10%, it will be able to generate thousands of new jobs,” he said.

It is a myth that the government can provide jobs to all citizens and the solution to unemployment lies in small and medium-sized enterprises rather than government jobs or for that matter large-scale manufacturing, he pointed out.

Elaborating, he said the government employs three million people while large-scale manufacturing has one million employees. This shows that still millions of people are employed in labour-intensive sectors like wholesale, retail and transport.

According to the agreement, IBA will train 300 graduates under a six-month ‘entrepreneurship development programme’.

In phase I, 300 candidates from different parts of Sindh will be selected for training. The students will be divided into two batches of 150 and the programme will be conducted by IBA Karachi and IBA Sukkur.

Published in The Express Tribune, July 4^th, 2012.