ISLAMABAD: The agriculture sector provisionally grew by 2.67 percent in 2019/2020 despite fall in production of cotton and sugarcane, revealed by Economic Survey 2019/2020 released on Thursday.
During the outgoing fiscal year the performance of the agriculture sector improved over the last year and it also performed better than other sectors.
However, the challenges due to climate change, pest attacks, shortage of water etc., kept agriculture production far less than the potential. One key issue related to agriculture is that the farmers have limited direct access to the market due to which the role of the middleman remains crucial.
And farmers normally do not receive fair market price of their produce. In terms of potential, agriculture sector has the capacity to not only produce for the domestic population but to have surplus production for exports, which can ensure food security as well as contribute towards foreign exchange earnings.
The important crops (wheat, rice, sugarcane, maize and cotton) account for 21.73 percent in the value addition of the agriculture sector and 4.20 percent in GDP.
The other crops account for 11.53 percent in the value addition of the agriculture sector and 2.23 percent in GDP.
The production of major crops during the fiscal year 2019/2020 is:
Cotton is likely to fall to 9.178 million bales during the outgoing fiscal year, posting 6.9 percent decline when compared with 9.86 million bales in the last fiscal year.
The production of sugar cane is also likely to fall by 0.4 percent to 66.88 million tons during fiscal year 2019/2020 as compared with 67.174 million tons in the last fiscal year.
The production of rice is expected to grow by 2.9 percent to 7.41 million tons during the outgoing fiscal year as compared with 7.2 million tons in the last fiscal year.
Maize production has been estimated to grow by 6 percent to 7.23 million tons during fiscal year 2019/2020 as compared with 6.82 million tons in the last fiscal year.
Meanwhile, wheat production has also been estimated to grow by 2.5 percent to 24.94 million tons during the outgoing fiscal year as compared with 24.35 million tons in the last fiscal year.
