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:

• SBP-BSC would organize farmers’ meetings/Agri Melas in collaboration with banks at different villages and would invite provincial agricultural departments’ officials in all such programs.
• The possibility of establishing banks’ booths at the ‘Agri Service Centers’ being established in major towns of Sindh would be explored
• The Revenue Departments would take steps to ensure expeditious issuance of passbooks to the farming community and the land record automation project in Sindh and Punjab would be completed on priority.
• While acknowledging the effectiveness of the forum, it was decided to organize the workshop on half yearly basis in all the provincial headquarters.
  
  The Presentations made in the workshop have been uploaded on SBP Web-site for wider dissemination of the
  workshop proceedings.