Tando Jam

Dr. Fateh Marri, Vice Chancellor, Sindh Agriculture University (SAU) Tando Jam said on Wednesday that the livelihood of more than 8 million farmers in Pakistan is related to livestock but the annual growth of this sector is only 4%.

He said this while addressing to the Final Workshop of “Sindh Livestock Forum” at Directorate of Agriculture Research Sindh Tando Jam organized by Dairy-Beef project team of University of Veterinary and Animal Sciences, Lahore in collaboration with the University Of Melbourne, Australia.

Dr. Marri said in 2020, the livestock industry contributed 60.6 % to overall agriculture and 11.7 % to the GDP. “Therefore it is proposed to give more priority to the trade in live animals and livestock products,” he urged.

“The SAU experts are working on the conservation of indigenous cattle breeds and new projects are started on animal product technology, value chain, and dairy products,” he added.

Dr. Fateh Marri said that although Pakistan is one of the largest milk-producing countries in the world, however per animal yield has been on the lower side, with the production of 57 million tons of milk annually from 24 million cows and buffaloes, and the average annual yield stands at 1.62 tones per animal.

During workshop the Dairy Beef Project Leader Dr. David McGill addressed the participants and shared the forum’s objectives and briefed about research finding and impacts of Dairy-Beef project extension and research, through video recoded message.

Dr. Arshad Kalhoro, Director General Live Stock Department appreciated the project team for their great contributions to improving the livelihood of the smallholder farmers, and he urges that the successful project activities should sustain by the National organizations to benefit all stakeholders and smallholder farmers.

Dr. Humera Iqbal,  Project Manager said that with regard to traditional livestock farming in Pakistan and these interventions, the project has played a role in reducing the challenges facing small farmers in Pakistan.

Hafiz Abdul Aziz provided the overview of project objectives and shared a historical background of ACIAR working in ASLP phase I, II, and the Dairy-Beef project, particularly in Sindh.

Dr. Aijaz Kumbhar and Dr. Sobia Majeed, Provincial Coordinators (Sindh) facilitated the forum.

Meanwhile, Dr. Fateh Marri handed over new tractors to the SAU Umerkot Sub Campus for enhancing the research work at its agriculture farms. The tractors were handed over at a simple ceremony attended by Pro Vice Chancellor of SAU Sub campus Dr. Jan Muhammad Marri and others. (PR)

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The post Pakistan’s livestock sector shows lowest annual growth first appeared on Sindh Courier.

By Nazarul Islam

A familiar teacher and author of Economics Text book Tyler Cowan has endeavored to explain in his textbook that GDP is the market value of all finished goods and services produced within a country in a year. This may sound simple but there are always (edge) cases including whether or not illegal goods should count towards GDP.

According to the definition, illegal goods should count towards GDP. But in practice they often don’t. In part because some people think that counting illegal goods would signal approval (or that not counting them signals disapproval) but also because it’s hard to count the market value of illegal goods.

Do we really expect the national Economic Data Organization to survey drug dealers and prostitutes about the price of their goods and services?

But what happens when an illegal good is legalized? The market value of any finished legal good should definitely count towards GDP but just adding it to GDP on the day of legalization causes problems. Did the economy boom the day pot was legalized? Did the recession end that day? Did we all become wealthier? Some countries shrug and just add footnotes.

In 1987, Italy, whose citizens are famous scofflaws when it comes to reporting income and paying taxes, announced that it was adjusting GDP upward by about a fifth to reflect the underground—but not necessarily illegal—economy. Overnight, Italy became the fifth-largest economy in the world, surpassing the United Kingdom.

National euphoria had ensued. Italians dubbed it “il sorpasso,” the overtaking…

But when Canada legalized pot in 2018, Statistics Canada decided not just to add pot to GDP but to backdate all their previous GDP statistics to create a consistent series. The Walrus has the interesting story.

The teams had to invent codes to capture classifications for new line items. Among them: 71.0105, in the classification of instructional programs for cannabis culinary arts and cannabis-chef training, and 71.0110, for cannabis-selling skills and sales operations.

…Apart from hammering out semantic protocols, StatCan faced two central hurdles in determining how to count cannabis: How much do Canadians use? And what does it cost? But the economists at StatCan wanted to calculate those numbers not just for the final quarter of 2018, when cannabis became legal, but for every year back to 1961, which is as far back as the national accounts go, at least in their current form.

…So the cannabis team dug back through decades of surveys on drug use, addiction rates, law enforcement, and health data to figure out how much cannabis Canadians were consuming back in the day. It started small, with as little as twenty-four tons a year in the early 1960s. By 2015, it was close to 700 tons. Until the 1990s, when the US war on drugs ramped up, a lot of that came from abroad. Now, we’re a major exporter.

Still, StatCan craved more detail. So, in 2018, analysts hooked up with researchers at McGill University’s department of chemical engineering for a year-long scrutiny of wastewater in Halifax, Montreal, Toronto, Edmonton, and Vancouver. (Halifax clocked in with the highest cannabis load per capita and roughly triple the usage of Vancouverites. Go figure.) That pilot project has now been suspended for lack of money, says Barber-Dueck.

The latest figures show that more than 2 million Canadians use cannabis at least once a week, and more than a third of those use it every day. But what have they been paying? Barber-Dueck says that the team ploughed into historical databases of weed prices, talked to law enforcement officers, and canvassed longtime illegal growers, mining their memories.

British Columbians were especially forthcoming. “People are pretty open about it and have been for years,” Barber-Dueck says.

As the legalization date approached, the team created the crowd-sourcing app StatsCannabis, complete with a cannabis logo. “Statistics Canada needs your help collecting cannabis prices,” the app pleads, adding, “Your data is protected!”

The technique had its drawbacks, Peluso notes. Heavy users of cannabis are the most frequent participants in the surveys by default. But they’re also filling out the survey right after they’ve made a purchase. “When you survey heavy users of a psychotropic substance, the error band is always a little bit bigger. You’re picking up people whose—How shall I put it?—whose awareness might be slightly compromised.”

So does pot contribute to GDP? It does in Canada but not in the United States!

Neither Canada nor the United States include prostitution in GDP although the Netherlands does. The United States has higher GDP per capita than either the Netherlands or Canada but if we included pot and prostitution in the nation’s GDP per capita would be even higher and would better reflect our true standard of living relative to these other countries!

Nazarul Islam

The Bengal-born writer Nazarul Islam is a senior educationist based in USA. He writes for Sindh Courier and the newspapers of Bangladesh, India and America. He is author of a recently published book ‘Chasing Hope’ – a compilation of his 119 articles.

The post Proceeds of illegal drugs count on GDP first appeared on Sindh Courier.

Tando Jam

In view of declining share of agriculture sector in Pakistan’s GDP, the progressive farmers, experts and technocrats from various federal and provincial departments and representatives of various agricultural organizations emphasized the need of using modern machinery, certified seeds and environmental-friendly farming methods to improve productivity and save natural resources of this sector.

“This will help alleviate the malnutrition in children and adolescents, which poses serious risks for the future,” they said speaking at a workshop on “Regenerative agriculture production system (RAPS)” organized in collaboration with Livestock and Fisheries Department at Senate Hall, Sindh Agriculture University Tando Jam on Friday. An awareness seminar on prevention of malnutrition in children and families through natural food was also held.

Addressing the workshop and seminar, Sindh Minister for Livestock and Fisheries Engineer Abdul Bari Pitafi said that despite no investment in agriculture sector for the last 72 years, it still contributes more than industry to the country’s GDP.

He said that the health sector of the province has a budget of Rs.250 billion while the livestock department has a budget of only Rs.6.5 billion. “Due to lack of required attention and investment in agriculture, its share in GDP has come down from 53% to 21%,” minister told.

Dr. Fateh Marri, Vice Chancellor, Sindh Agriculture University, said that mental and physical weakness is on the rise in Sindh, especially among women and children, due to malnutrition, therefore, the use of dairy and agricultural products and improved ecosystem will provide better manpower to the country to the future generations. He added that resettlement of arid and saline lands and improvement of soil fertility will solve many agricultural problems.

Hamid Jaleel, member Planning Commission Pakistan said, “We are destroying the natural system by existing methods of cultivation. We are eliminating underground fertility, soil moisture and carbon by blowing it into the air, killing beneficial bacteria and soil by all means.”

Dr. Nazir Hussain Kalhoro, Director General Livestock said that malnutrition has created a dangerous situation which will prevent 50% of the youth from getting jobs and business in the next 20 years. He said that at present the rate of youth in the country is 64% and due to malnutrition the rate will reduce to 27% after 20 years.

Agriculture Expert from Punjab Asif Sharif said through online speech that the country’s agriculture is going through a critical period. “The future of agriculture is declining due to growing population and lack of understanding of agricultural farming conditions.”

Syed Mehmood Nawaz Shah, Vice President Sindh Aabadgar Board said that modern agriculture can give better results.

Syed Miran Mohammad Shah, Chairman Chamber of Agriculture said, “We are experimenting in different ways, but institutions must address issues related to agriculture on a priority basis.”

Shabnam Baloch, Provincial Leader, International Trade Center (GRASP), said that value chain and livestock by-products should be given priority in agriculture. She said that agriculture in the world is run by the private sector, so now it has to be understood as an industry.

Dr. Muhammad Ismail Kambhar, Dr. Abdullah Sethar and others spoke on the occasion. Director General Agriculture Research Noor Muhammad Baloch, Progressive Dr. Zulfiqar Yousafani, Zahid Bhurgri, Syed Zarar Haider, Syed Noor Muhammad Shah, Nabi Bakhsh Sathio, Karim Talpur, Sharif Nizamani, Agha Zafarullah Durrani, Commander Atif and other progressive farmers, Agriculture Experts, personalities from different fields participated. (PR)

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