Farmers do not realise that they are paying a heavy price on exemption from income tax. While the manufacturers pay low or no government levies on inputs, all the inputs of farm producers are heavily taxed.
This is the reason that despite being an agricultural country, we are constrained to import commodities that we were exporting two decades back. We not only import wheat, our staple food, we also import raw cotton that is our largest industrial input. We periodically import sugar whenever we allow its export on subsidy.
One major reason that farm yields are going down is the lack of locally produced high yielding seed varieties. Our productivity is suffering because we depend on poor seed varieties that have low yield and low germination as well as poor survival on account of climate change. This stems from lopsided seed regulatory framework that leads to supply of low-yielding varieties in the fields.
Our import of edible oil has increased because we have lost a large chunk of cotton oil after cotton production gradually declined from 14 million bales to only 7 million bales a year. Despite textile being our largest exporting sector, we have not taken enough measures to improve cotton production across the country.
On top of that water stress as well as disturbances caused by climate change, such as heat waves and untimely rains, have wreaked havoc on the agriculture sector. Farmers are already under stress because these issues have disturbed the cropping pattern.
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Read Full Story: https://www.thenews.com.pk/magazine/money-matters/963628-depressing-productivity
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