Action Plan Needed For National Rice Food Security, Sustainability

Speakers at a seminar here Friday stressed the need to start a dialogue among all the rice stakeholders to design a pragmatic action plan for ensuring national rice food security and sustainability

ISLAMABAD, (UrduPoint / Pakistan Point News - 20th Sep, 2019 ) :Speakers at a seminar here Friday stressed the need to start a dialogue among all the rice stakeholders to design a pragmatic action plan for ensuring national rice food security and sustainability.

The seminar on "Water Productivity and Sustainable Rice Production" was organized by Rice Partners (Pvt) Ltd (RPL) in collaboration with Helvetas Swiss Inter-cooperation and Mars food for rice growers in Multan, a press statement said.

Director Agriculture Multan Department Dr Muhammad Aslam talking to rice growers said rice was the major staple food for more than half of the world population and a source of employment for millions of farmers.

RPL Chief Operating Officer Muhammad Ali Tariq said Pakistan was among seven top most water scarce countries, stressing on developing an action plan and implementing it in true spirit so that the farmers could produce the rice with minimum use of water without any yield or quality penalty.

Some 700 rice growers and officials from public and private sector including agriculture, NGOs, academia and media participated in the seminar and shared their experiences with each other, the principles of sustainable rice production were highlighted by the speakers.

The RPL Project Manager Zafar Iqbal said they were promoting sustainable rice production and water productivity in rice value chain.

The RPL has trained more than 18,000 farmers in sustainable agriculture, water productivity crop in rice value chain and crop management.

The RPL contract farming program help the farmers a lot in terms of low cost on crop production, water efficiency in the rice cultivation and livelihoods of the farmers have been improved.

Dr Tahir Awan, Senior Scientist Rice Research Institute Kala Shah Kaku, said this was the time to support poor rice farmers to reduce their cost of production and increase yield of rice by adopting conservation agri-techniques.