‘Mechanise farming to raise productivity’

AMRI Director said that Pakistan’s cropped area was 69 per cent of the cultivatable area which was 30.7 million...

MULTAN:

“Farm mechanisation should be encouraged to increase agricultural production,” said Parliamentary Secretary on Agriculture Rana Ijaz Ahmad Noon said on Monday.

He was addressing a workshop at Agriculture Mechanisation Research Institute (AMRI).

Noon said productivity would improve if agriculture engineers encouraged use of modern machinery in their areas.

Agriculture Additional Secretary Muhammad Akhtar said the government was targeting to produce 2 million skilled workers in five years.

He said manufacturers should take advantage of this opportunity and contact the Technical Education and Vocational Training Authority (Tevta) to design training programmes for their unskilled labour.

He advised agriculture engineers to work on cost-effective and efficient alternatives to enable low-income farmers to consider mechanisation.

He said spray machines should be manufactured in such a way that workers’ safety was assured.  He said officials should evaluate the quality and specifications of tractors and other machinery before they were handed over to farmers at subsidised prices under the government schemes.  AMRI Director Ghulam Siddiq said that Pakistan’s cropped area was 69 per cent of the cultivatable area which was 30.7 million acres.  He said another 3.9 million acres could be made cultivable through deployment of skilled work force.

He said there were 500,000 tractors in the Punjab in addition to 338 bulldozers deployed on 20,000 acres.  Progressive Grower’s Association representative Mumtaz Ahmad Khan Manais said the government should the lift ban on import of tractors. He said local manufacturers were providing old technology to farmers. He said the government should establish centres from where farmers could hire tractors and other machinery at affordable rates. Representatives of manufacturers said that unavailability of raw material, taxes, load shedding and power tariffs were the main hurdles in production of machinery for agriculture. Noon remarked that public-private partnership initiatives could benefit farmers only when there was good coordination between the public and private sectors.

Published in The Express Tribune, August 18^th, 2015.