Agriculture is the backbone of almost all the economies of the Asian continent. Pakistan is no different with agriculture exports earning the maximum amount of revenues for the country.
Scholars of the nation have dubbed agriculture as the backbone of the country which is very essential for the growth and development of its people. They have urged the government authorities to pay more attention to the problems of the farmers and to provide subsidies on agricultural inputs and to supply them with loans. It has been noticed that rural as well as urban population in Pakistan is intricately dependent on agriculture.
And agricultural development is heavily dependent on poverty alleviation, water resources and the like. So it is obvious that for the country to make rapid strides in advancement towards a better future, the government should try to make the living conditions of the farmers better by providing them all amenities.
One of the options for doing this would be to have better farm inputs which allow the growers to get better and higher yields per hectare. This in turn would improve the living condition of people within the country as well as increase the export earnings.
Over the past half a century, there has been substantial agricultural development in Pakistan. The primary aspect of expansion has been horizontal growth. Pakistan authorities have been largely trying to increase the amount of land under farming. This has been possible by improving the irrigation facilities in the country.
Only 40% of the entire land in the country can be ploughed. The rest is deserts, urban development land, and the like. So the best thing that they could do would be to improve upon the existing land devoted to farming. They have made agricultural development possible by improving the water resources available to each tract of fertile land, thus enhancing productivity of that piece of land. But the problem is far from over.
The main occupation in this part of the world is farming and agriculture. Considering the ever-increasing growth of the population, it is necessary that there are adequate resources of land to be tilled and used for planting crops that would help in feeding the millions of mouths.
Pakistan has been devoted to the study of various methods for increasing the productivity of the already existing land mass and also adding newer ones to supplement agricultural development.
Pakistan is one of the members of the AOA due to which it is bound to make developments in improving the overall agricultural trade situation. The AOA or the Agreement on Agriculture which is a document by the World Trade Organization examines the overall agricultural trade situation of different nations from different viewpoints.
The plethora of angles from which to see include food trade, domestic sufficiency and the export subsidies. The primary difficulty for Pakistan has been the regular increase in the amount of imports in the food department in spite of the overall increase in agricultural production. This has spawned off a widespread task of trying to get the imports down to a minimum which would help in reducing the international debt of the nation.
The government is unwilling to try to cut down the imports because a healthy portion comprises of vital and necessary food items for the poor and destitute. Stopping these imports would pose lots of problems.
Agricultural trade seems to be improving, though, with the increased yield per hectare due to better and sophisticated methods of farming in Pakistan today. The basic solution to all the problems would be to further increase the yield which would help in curbing down poverty.
