The provincial minister for agriculture, Mohammad Ismail Rahu, has said that in order to promote agriculture in Sindh and protect crops from the use of toxic pesticides, 50 centers of Natural Enemy Farm Reservoir (NEFR) have been set up across Sindh.
This he said while inaugurating a center of NEFR at Syed Manzoor Hussain Shah Jilani farm near Sultanabad. He said that the growers mostly used various pesticides to protect the crops from insects but the effects of these pesticides remained in the crops which, he said,often caused diseases in human beings.
Mr Rahu informed that there were 1 million species of agro-insects in the world out of which only 1% were harmful for crops and to eradicate them NEFR centers were being set up not only to protect crops from pesticides but also diseases and the government’s health bill would significantly be reduced. He said that Sindh Irrigated Agriculture Productivity Enhancement Project (SIAPEP) had been launched by the Sindh Agriculture Department which had three different components under which water courses would be lined to prevent wastage of water and deal with water shortage. He informed that in the first phase of this project work of lining of 5500 water courses had been started across Sindh out of which 4232 water courses had been completed while remaining watercourses would be completed by the end of this year. He said that due to shortage of water in Sindh, a drip irrigation system was being introduced which had yielded better results as under this system water was consumed less and production increased.
He said that all the tube wells installed by the Sindh agriculture department would soon be converted to the solar system so that the farmers could avoid heavy electricity bills.
He said that the second component of SIAPEP included laser leveling under which technical training was being imported so that farmers could select approper land for appropriate crop cultivation. The Sindh minister said that they had already taken the initiatives to avoid the wastage of the irrigation water adding he said that despite the limited resources available with them they were making concerted efforts to provide the required facilities to the farmers without any descrimination.
He said that there was urgent to need to adopt the export and import of the vegetables and fruits keeping in the view the prevailing situations in all the provinces adding he urged the functionaries of the federal government to sit with the provincial authorities to devise the effective policies and plans to provide maximum relief to the farming community of the country. He said that they had taken many revolutionary initiatives to boost bio-saline agriculture in Tharparkar district to bring the real change in the lifestyle of Tharis. Rahu said that they were also trying to promote the kitchen gardening and farming in the desert district where the female farmers were already doing wonders by cultivating the traditional and other crops to cater to their needs in the drought years.