New Green Revolution?

Country falling behind on farm mechanization

Pakistani agriculture is beset by a number of problems, among them the lack of mechanization. A report in the latest issue of this newspaper’s Profit magazine examines this, and shows that Pakistan has fallen behind countries like China, India and Bangladesh in one important metric, that of horsepower per acre, whereas they had been around these at the time of the 1960s, when the Green Revolution is supposed to have begun, with the introduction of new seeds and varieties of existing crops. Best by the problems posed by a failure to carry out changes to seeds by research, as well as by the vicissitudes of climate change, the country is shooting itself in the foot by paying little or no attention to the question of farm mechanization. So far, agriculture has carried the burden of the country, providing it food security, and employment for the majority of its population. Unfortunately, it is not very efficient, and unless this efficiency is improved by mechanization, there will be a collapse of agriculture with a dramatic spread of starvation. Already, there are signs of deprivation and food crisis that could get out of control if not dealt with immediately. It does not help that there is an impending water crisis. Not only does India have evil intentions towards the waters of the Indus, but climate change is making the future look bleak.

The main problem with mechanization is that it is expensive. Such equipment as harvesters, blazers or seed drills do not come cheap. They are also needed to run all the time, not to be parked. One solution, the Custom Hiring Centres, seemed derived from the Soviet Machine Tractor Stations, which operated independently of the collective farms, to which it would hire out equipment. Another means of obtaining the machinery tried in the past have been farmers’ cooperatives. However, there has been a problem supervising them in the past.

It has also been observed that these mechanization efforts were made to improve agriculture. The problem now seems to be that of saving it. It should be noted that one tractor manufacturer is going into electric vehicles, and while the manufacturers have gone into equipment, there is not enough being made. The government has started worrying about agriculture, and it must also examine this aspect, along with other problems like seeds.