Dr. Shafqat Munir (Economist): It is welcoming step that government is giving top priority to enhancing agricultural productivity, promoting value addition and increasing exports of agricultural products. Food insecurity is a big brewing crisis in Pakistan and across the world. Pakistan has always been an agricultural based country, but as per recently released Economic Survey of Pakistan, revealed that food crops’ production has gone down by six per cent in Pakistan. It means that we have to do a lot for having a sustainable agricultural yield. This is why; today Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif held a meeting where all these issues were discussed in detail. Particularly, if you have a look on the region, entire region has similar climate situation, but there are few of our neighbouring countries which are getting more per hector yield than us. So we need to ensure our food security through better use of water and growing high value added crops; particularly crops which are staple food in Pakistan. It is a big challenge that is why the government is putting more efforts on growing more and more food for the growing population. We need to have a balance in growing population and food production to secure food in future. So we need to have modernized and mechanized climate smart agriculture for high value produce items to feed our people in future. We have to change our traditional agricultural means to go for high tech agricultural methods. Particularly we need immense research on seeds to have more yields for our people. So Pakistan is focusing on adopting modern technologies in agricultural sector as due to climate change we are facing water shortage and our agriculture is consuming almost 80 per cent of our fresh water. Now we need to introduce less water consuming varieties of crops to ensure water conservation. We need to water our crops through sprinkle or other water saving technologies.

Dr. Abid Gill (Economist): We need a comprehensive and composite plan to ensure prosperity of our land owners. In this regards, land reforms, corporate agriculture and machine culture can play vital role in agricultural sector’s promotion and growth. Moreover, climate change is another challenge and Pakistan is the fifth worst climate affected country in the world. Our farmer is not getting competitive price of his yield as middle man is exploiting hard toil of our farmers. So we need to ensure global competitive price of our agriculture yield to our farmers and growers otherwise our growers may not be able to continue sticking to their profession. Our research institutions are strong pillars in agriculture sector’s promotion therefore these agricultural research institutes should have linkages with international research institutions. Several factors have played their due role in stagnating our agricultural produces; therefore, we need to move forward towards adaption of new seeds, controlling sale of substandard seeds and pesticides and fertilizers.