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Even a bird's-eye view of the finance minister's budget speech may detect two vital lapses.

These consist of:

1) Agricultural marketing and

2) Quality control of farm products.

Several times the author of the article has emphasised the need of streamlining the agricultural marketing to make the production-oriented agriculture more beneficial for uplifting the national economy.

As a matter of fact, agricultural marketing has been a crucial missing link in the overall agricultural regime as for, quality control, its historical background is as under:

It was inherited by the country, right at the birth of Pakistan. It had a two-fold approach. One the grading of some food items like ghee, butter, edible oil etc, on voluntary basis for internal transactions. And the other compulsory grading of certain exportable commodities.

The voluntary grading came to a standstill on its transfer to the provinces which could not make any headway in this regard, for reasons best known to them.

In the case of compulsory grading, the first commodity, before export, was introduced, was raw wool.

That paid appreciable dividends to the producers, businessmen and all other concerned. With the passage of time, severe other exportable items continued to come into the net of compulsory grading.

And the list of such items continued inflating to about 26 items, both of livestock and agricultural origin.

Unfortunately, during the initial period of the rule of the military chief executive (now president of Pakistan), quality control through compulsory grading before export was arbitrarily stopped by the competent authority. It was a bolt from blue to the federal marketing department (responsible for performing this important function).

This commendable work in respect of commodities of agricultural origin came to a halt. However grading of commodities of livestock origin is still in vogue.

With this background, the FM should have uttered a word about it in his budget speech, Isn't it an inexcusable lapse on his part?

After having explained these lapses, it would not be inopportune to elaborate the concept of marketing.

Marketing is not just buying and selling of farm products. On the contrary, it encompasses various other functions like transportation produce from the farm to market (wholesale markets), prescribing reasonable charges for loading, unloading, cleaning, storage as well as commission for various market functionaries particularly of commission agents, wholesalers to protect the farmers from undue exploitation by the former.

In order to achieve this reform, agricultural wholesale markets have been regulated under the respective provincial legislations. Regulated markets are working in all the four provinces in varying number.

These are about 36 in Punjab, 80 in Sindh and one each in NWFP and Balochistan.

However, there is a need to streamline the workings of these markets which leaves much to be required.

Budget 2004-05 should have thrown some light on this situation to guide the provinces to activate regulated markets in their respective jurisdictions.

Similarly, it was also the 'pleasant' duty of the FM to speak on the pros and cons of the compulsory grading of commodities of agricultural origin (hitherto it was subject to compulsory grading before export).

However, apart from the above two significant lapses, the FM has done full justice to agriculture as a whole for which he must be facilitated. God bless the FM!!

Copyright Business Recorder, 2004


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