THE grass gets trampled, as the saying goes.
For the sake of this article, the elephants are Punjab, Sindh, GPI, corporate farming and so on.
And, the potentially trampled grass is the 7.4 million small farming families of Pakistan.
I am speaking here of the myriad agro-related projects that are being planned which will bring millions of acres of new land under cultivation and for which water will be diverted from the already stretched and insufficient water sources.
To start, GPI has identified 4.8 million acres of state land for lease to engage incorporate agriculture farming.
The News reported that a private limited company was registered in August, with over 90% of its shares held by the Pakistan Army.
This company will lease the land for 30 years through joint ventures and allocate it to investors for corporate farming projects.
The idea has merit.
Why not utilize government land for productive agricultural purposes?
The idea of increasing agriculture production cannot be overstated since we need to feed a nation where more than 50 percent of the families are food insecure, 40 percent of our children are malnourished and stunted and we are an overall importer of food.
However, one has to wonder about the efficacy of the model, and whether this concept will cause more harm than good.
Furthermore, what other solutions are there worth considering.
The following are some deliberations for the policy makers.
The first consideration is the lack of water resources to support further farming in Pakistan.
Admittedly, I am not a water expert so please forgive my oversimplification of the numbers presented here.
The numbers may be less relevant than the problems emerging from this project, so it merits discussion.
My quick online research points out that on average, Indus dumps approximately 30 MAF into the Arabian Sea.
By many accounts, that is less water than is required to ecologically support the Indus river delta.
So, it is not water “wasted” but water that is needed to go through the delta into the sea.
Now, if we were to provide water to 10 million acres of new land (a figure that is being circulated), we would require a lot of water.
How much is dependent on the crop but usually crops require anywhere from 1 AF to 6 AF per acre.
If we use an average of 3 AF per acre, 10 million acres would require 30 MAF – the same amount that is going to the sea.
So clearly, Indus does not have the water to irrigate the new land proposed for cultivation and the water has to come from existing resources.
As previously noted, the small farmers of Pakistan, 90% of farmers numbered at 7.4 million, hold 5 acres or less.
If we were to take an average farm size of 3 acres, the small farmers have a cumulative holding of 22 million acres.
By our previous discussion, they require roughly 66 MAF.
And to irrigate the 10 million new acres, we would need to divert half of this water from the small farmers, who are already water stressed.
So what then happens to the rural population of Pakistan, the small farming families?
In the end, the small farmers, the backbone of Pakistan rural economy and the employer of 80% of the women workforce of Pakistan will suffer.
Other than increasing agriculture output to feed the nation, sustaining small farmers is another key issue that needs to be addressed and there are solutions.
Before I get into the possible solutions, let us address the bigger issue that is being created out of this arguable misadventure of creating 10 million acre farmland and the subsequent canals needed to irrigate them.
In the press and elsewhere, the whole issue is being turned into a Sindh-Punjab issue, that is, Punjab is taking water away from Sindh.
To this, I say, let us not go down this rabbit hole, yet again.
It is not which province is taking water away from which province, but rather, the elite are taking away water from small farmers all over Pakistan.
At a micro-level, this would starve out 7.4 million families, around 60 million people.
How then do we cater to all the competing interests of expanding our agro base, create water for all and also stabilize the small farmers by increasing their income.
In previous articles, I have noted that almost 40% of Pakistan fruits and vegetables are subject to wastage or post-harvest losses.
We need to bring these losses into the market by launching value added processes at the grass root level.
Not only will we bring 40% more food into the economy, but by some estimates, we would create a $20 billion processed food sector.
So rather than bringing in more land under cultivation, let us focus first on capitalizing on what we are already producing.
Concurrently, the same small farmers that we have been discussing need to be taught to get away from water intensive farming to green farming like tunnel farming and focus on horticulture produce.
And they need to be taught value added processing.
This would reduce their reliance on a lot of water while also tripling their income from the same plot of land.
Let us stop the elephants from fighting and focus on growing the grass, not trampling it.
—The writer is a former Senior Advisor to the Government and a sector development specialist.
He is a member of the APP Think Tank and Pakistan’s Buddhist Heritage Promotion Ambassador for GTPL, a company under SIFC.
