Sharing
Provincial Governments’ Initiatives and Best Practices
in Farmers’ Facilitation 25th June 2008 at LRC SBP Karachi
Agriculture being a provincial subject, each province maintains
a fairly large Agricultural Department and field Network for
facilitating the farmers of their respective province in improving
their productivity and production levels and also helping
them in timely sale of their produce. Every year each province
initiates and completes various projects with varied impact.
There seems to be however limited coordination between the
provincial agricultural departments to share their initiative
and lessons learned etc. Among others this has also resulted
into variations in productivity and credit absorptive capacity
of the farmers of each of the four provinces. The Agricultural
Credit data shows that Punjab fetches about 80% of total agri-credit
in the country and rest of the provinces obtain just 20%.
The position is attributable among others to relatively better
credit absorptive capacity of the farmers in Punjab.
Recognizing the need for greater coordination amongst the
agricultural stakeholders and dissemination of Federal and
Provincial Governments initiatives, experiences, projects
and plans to strengthen the agricultural sector, the SBP-BSC
organized an Inter-Provincial Agricultural Workshop at Learning
Resource, SBP in Karachi on 25th June, 08.
This was the first workshop of its kind organized by Development
Finance Support Department of SBP-BSC, which was attended
by senior officials of the Ministry of Food, Agriculture and
Livestock (MINFAL) and Provincial Agricultural and Revenue
Departments and heads of agri-finance departments of 15 commercial
banks.
The officials of Agricultural and Revenue Departments of each
of the four provinces and AJK made detailed presentations
on their respective department’s plans and projects
for facilitating the farming community for increasing their
productivity.
Following decisions were taken in the workshop: