Most Indians and Pakistanis Work in Agriculture and Textile Sectors
About 60% of India's workforce is in agriculture. Textile industry is the second biggest employer, accounting for a fifth of India’s exports, and employs almost 10 percent of India’s workforce, or some 35 million people, and has the potential to add another 12 million new jobs --dwarfing the 1-2 million jobs created by the much-heralded IT and BPO sector, according to a World Bank report.
The largest number of people in other South Asian nations are also employed in the agriculture sector, followed by textile manufacturing as the second largest employer.
About 60% of India's workforce is engaged in agriculture, contributing about 16% of GDP, according to published data. Textile manufacturing claims the second largest employment and comprises 26% of manufacturing output. It accounts for a fifth of India’s exports, and employs almost 10 percent of India’s workforce, or some 35 million people, and has the potential to add another 12 million new jobs --dwarfing the 1-2 million jobs created by the much-heralded IT and BPO sector, according to a World Bank report. Even the most optimistic estimates by NASSCOM put the total direct and indirect employment in IT and ITES sectors at 10 million jobs.
The textile sector is crucial to India's economy. The textile industry contributed 4% of India's gross domestic product in the year that ended March 31, and accounted for 13.5% of Indian exports, bringing in $17.6 billion, according to the Wall Street Journal.
With the Indian rupee soaring — up 9 percent against the dollar in the last 16 months, textile exports are down 6.4 percent from a year earlier in the $10 billion Indian clothing industry, according to a recent report in the New York Times.
About 23% of the India's workforce is part of the services sector which accounted for 55% of the GDP in 2007. Within the service sector, the fastest growing segment is business services, contributing about 7% of GDP. It includes information technology enabled services (ITES), information technology (IT), business process outsourcing (BPO) etc. In 2000, it was one third of the total output of services.
Agriculture in Pakistan accounts for 19.4% of GDP and 42% of labor force, followed by services providing 53.4% of GDP and 38% employment, with the remainder 27.2% of GDP and 20% workers in manufacturing sector. Over half of Pakistan's manufacturing jobs are in the textile sector, making it the second biggest employer after agriculture.
The dire situation in India's agriculture sector has been epitomized by over 200,000 farmers' suicides in the last decade. And the rising Indian rupee is now hurting India's textile sector by making its exports more expensive in the world market.
Pakistan's agriculture and textile sectors have also suffered in the last two years. Reduced water flows from India followed by recent floods have adversely affected large swathes of Pakistan's farmland. And the current energy crisis combined with the economic slowdown have hit the textile industry particularly hard. The European Commission, the EU's executive, has recently approved tariff waivers on 75 categories of imports from Pakistan for up to three years, according to a report in the Wall Street Journal. The gesture followed an order by EU leaders wanting to demonstrate they're helping some 10 million Pakistanis left without shelter in the wake of floods.
Pakistan shipped about $4.2 billion of exports to EU last year. About 75% of Pakistani exports to EU are textiles, clothing, leather or related products, and those goods will make up a majority of the roughly $140 million in total extra trade the EU says the deal will generate from eliminating the EU tariffs.
Here is a quick comparison of different sectors of the economy in India and Pakistan in terms of employment and GDP contribution:
Country....Agri(emp/GDP)..Textiles..Other Mfg..Service(incl IT)
India........60%/16% ...........10%/4%.....7%/25%...........23%/55%
Pakistan......42%/20%...........12%/8%......8%/18%...........38%/54%
Assuming India's PPP GDP of $3.75 trillion (population 1.2 billion, nominal gdp $1.3 trillion) and Pakistan's $450 billion (population 175 million, nominal gdp $167 billion)), here is what I calculated in terms of per capita GDP in different sectors of the economy:
India vs. Pakistan: Per Capita GDP $3,125 PPP ($1,083 nom) vs. $2,570 ($955 nom)
Agriculture: $833 PPP ($288 nom) vs. $1,225 PPP ($454 nom)
Textiles: $1,242 ($433) vs. $1,714 ($636)
Non-Textile Mfg: $11,155 ($3,870) vs $5,785 ($2,142)
Services $7,246 ($2,590) vs $3,654 ($1356)
Data shows that the majority of Indians who work in agriculture and textiles are on average 50% poorer than their Pakistani counterparts, as also reflected in the under-$2 a day per capita income figures for 60% of Pakistanis and 76% of Indians.
It also shows that Indians in manufacturing and services sectors add almost twice as much value as Pakistanis, and produce significantly higher value goods and services than their Pakistani counterparts.
The income range in India is much wider from $883 to $11,155 accounting for the much bigger rich-poor gap relative to Pakistan's relatively narrower range from $1225 to $5,785.
The challenge for India is to improve its farmers' productivity and move some of them into higher value added sectors of the economy.
The challenge for Pakistan is to have its manufacturing and services sectors produce more goods and services of higher value, and continue to migrate more of its farmers into other sectors of the economy.
It's clear that farming and textiles continue to be the most important economic sectors with the biggest impact on the lives of the majority of ordinary citizens of India and Pakistan. And just as the US and EU look after their farmers, it is very important for South Asian governments to protect their farming and textile sectors even as they promote diversification of their economies.
Related Links:
Haq's Musings
Pakistan Textile Industry Report
Pakistan's Farmland Controversy
Peepli Live and India's Farmers' Suicides
Floods in Pakistan
Pakistan's Textile Woes
Agricultural Growth in India, Pakistan and Bangladesh
KPMG Report on Pakistan Economy 2010
India and Pakistan Contrasted
Pakistan's Major Business Sectors
Labor Laws: To Create Good Jobs, Reform Labor Regulations
Foreign Investors Buying Pakistani Farm Land
Is Leasing Agricultural Land to Foreigners a Good Idea?
Pakistan's Sugar Crisis and Dietary Habits
Wheat Research and Development in Pakistan
Pakistan's Water Crisis
Wheat Productivity, Efficiency and Sustainability
Agrarian Reform in Pakistan
Urbanization in Pakistan
Water Scarcity in Pakistan
Pakistan Agribusiness Report 2009
Pakistan to Lease 700,000 Acres to Arab States
Pakistan's Total Arable Land
The largest number of people in other South Asian nations are also employed in the agriculture sector, followed by textile manufacturing as the second largest employer.
About 60% of India's workforce is engaged in agriculture, contributing about 16% of GDP, according to published data. Textile manufacturing claims the second largest employment and comprises 26% of manufacturing output. It accounts for a fifth of India’s exports, and employs almost 10 percent of India’s workforce, or some 35 million people, and has the potential to add another 12 million new jobs --dwarfing the 1-2 million jobs created by the much-heralded IT and BPO sector, according to a World Bank report. Even the most optimistic estimates by NASSCOM put the total direct and indirect employment in IT and ITES sectors at 10 million jobs.
The textile sector is crucial to India's economy. The textile industry contributed 4% of India's gross domestic product in the year that ended March 31, and accounted for 13.5% of Indian exports, bringing in $17.6 billion, according to the Wall Street Journal.
With the Indian rupee soaring — up 9 percent against the dollar in the last 16 months, textile exports are down 6.4 percent from a year earlier in the $10 billion Indian clothing industry, according to a recent report in the New York Times.
About 23% of the India's workforce is part of the services sector which accounted for 55% of the GDP in 2007. Within the service sector, the fastest growing segment is business services, contributing about 7% of GDP. It includes information technology enabled services (ITES), information technology (IT), business process outsourcing (BPO) etc. In 2000, it was one third of the total output of services.
Agriculture in Pakistan accounts for 19.4% of GDP and 42% of labor force, followed by services providing 53.4% of GDP and 38% employment, with the remainder 27.2% of GDP and 20% workers in manufacturing sector. Over half of Pakistan's manufacturing jobs are in the textile sector, making it the second biggest employer after agriculture.
The dire situation in India's agriculture sector has been epitomized by over 200,000 farmers' suicides in the last decade. And the rising Indian rupee is now hurting India's textile sector by making its exports more expensive in the world market.
Pakistan's agriculture and textile sectors have also suffered in the last two years. Reduced water flows from India followed by recent floods have adversely affected large swathes of Pakistan's farmland. And the current energy crisis combined with the economic slowdown have hit the textile industry particularly hard. The European Commission, the EU's executive, has recently approved tariff waivers on 75 categories of imports from Pakistan for up to three years, according to a report in the Wall Street Journal. The gesture followed an order by EU leaders wanting to demonstrate they're helping some 10 million Pakistanis left without shelter in the wake of floods.
Pakistan shipped about $4.2 billion of exports to EU last year. About 75% of Pakistani exports to EU are textiles, clothing, leather or related products, and those goods will make up a majority of the roughly $140 million in total extra trade the EU says the deal will generate from eliminating the EU tariffs.
Here is a quick comparison of different sectors of the economy in India and Pakistan in terms of employment and GDP contribution:
Country....Agri(emp/GDP)..Textiles..Other Mfg..Service(incl IT)
India........60%/16% ...........10%/4%.....7%/25%...........23%/55%
Pakistan......42%/20%...........12%/8%......8%/18%...........38%/54%
Assuming India's PPP GDP of $3.75 trillion (population 1.2 billion, nominal gdp $1.3 trillion) and Pakistan's $450 billion (population 175 million, nominal gdp $167 billion)), here is what I calculated in terms of per capita GDP in different sectors of the economy:
India vs. Pakistan: Per Capita GDP $3,125 PPP ($1,083 nom) vs. $2,570 ($955 nom)
Agriculture: $833 PPP ($288 nom) vs. $1,225 PPP ($454 nom)
Textiles: $1,242 ($433) vs. $1,714 ($636)
Non-Textile Mfg: $11,155 ($3,870) vs $5,785 ($2,142)
Services $7,246 ($2,590) vs $3,654 ($1356)
Data shows that the majority of Indians who work in agriculture and textiles are on average 50% poorer than their Pakistani counterparts, as also reflected in the under-$2 a day per capita income figures for 60% of Pakistanis and 76% of Indians.
 |
| Agriculture Value Added Per Worker in Constant 2000 US$ (Source: World Bank) |
It also shows that Indians in manufacturing and services sectors add almost twice as much value as Pakistanis, and produce significantly higher value goods and services than their Pakistani counterparts.
The income range in India is much wider from $883 to $11,155 accounting for the much bigger rich-poor gap relative to Pakistan's relatively narrower range from $1225 to $5,785.
The challenge for India is to improve its farmers' productivity and move some of them into higher value added sectors of the economy.
The challenge for Pakistan is to have its manufacturing and services sectors produce more goods and services of higher value, and continue to migrate more of its farmers into other sectors of the economy.
It's clear that farming and textiles continue to be the most important economic sectors with the biggest impact on the lives of the majority of ordinary citizens of India and Pakistan. And just as the US and EU look after their farmers, it is very important for South Asian governments to protect their farming and textile sectors even as they promote diversification of their economies.
Related Links:
Haq's Musings
Pakistan Textile Industry Report
Pakistan's Farmland Controversy
Peepli Live and India's Farmers' Suicides
Floods in Pakistan
Pakistan's Textile Woes
Agricultural Growth in India, Pakistan and Bangladesh
KPMG Report on Pakistan Economy 2010
India and Pakistan Contrasted
Pakistan's Major Business Sectors
Labor Laws: To Create Good Jobs, Reform Labor Regulations
Foreign Investors Buying Pakistani Farm Land
Is Leasing Agricultural Land to Foreigners a Good Idea?
Pakistan's Sugar Crisis and Dietary Habits
Wheat Research and Development in Pakistan
Pakistan's Water Crisis
Wheat Productivity, Efficiency and Sustainability
Agrarian Reform in Pakistan
Urbanization in Pakistan
Water Scarcity in Pakistan
Pakistan Agribusiness Report 2009
Pakistan to Lease 700,000 Acres to Arab States
Pakistan's Total Arable Land
Comments
India vs. Pakistan:
Agriculture: ($833 vs. $1,225)
Textiles: ($1,242 vs. $1,714)
Non-Textile Mfg ($11,155 vs $5,785)
Services ($7,246 vs $3,654)
It shows that Indians in manufacturing and services sectors add more value and produce higher value goods and services than their Pakistani counterparts.
The income range in India is much wider from $883 to $11, 155 accounting for the much bigger rich-poor gap relative to Pakistan's range from $1225 to $5,785.
NEW DELHI (AFP) – More than 17,000 Indian farmers committed suicide in 2009, a seven percent rise on the previous year, according to new government figures.
The National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB) study titled "Accidental Deaths and Suicides in India" revealed the rise without attributing causes, with the states of Maharashtra, Karnataka and Andhra Pradesh the worst affected.
Many farmers, particularly in the southern and western states listed, were pushed further into debt in 2009 after the weakest monsoon in 37 years left fields parched and crops ruined.
Despite economic development in cities, two out of three Indians still live and work in rural areas and as many as 150,000 farmers have killed themselves in the past decade, the Tata Institute of Social Sciences said in 2009.
The subject was taken up in an acclaimed Bollywood film last year called "Peepli Live" made by the production company of superstar Aamir Khan.
The film, directed by first-time director Anusha Rizvi, revolves around two poor farmers who face losing their land over an unpaid debt after poor monsoon rains, with one considering killing himself so that his family receives compensation.
In other statistics, the study said that a total of 127,151 people took their own lives in 2009 and about 125,000 people or about 350 a day died on the country's notoriously dangerous roads.
Road deaths increased by 7.3 percent in 2009 from 2008, following a long-term trend that has seen road deaths mirror increases in vehicle sales.
Since 2005, the number of fatal road accidents has increased by 30 percent, tracking a 35-percent rise in the number of vehicles.
India's booming economy is raising personal incomes and corporate profits, enabling middle-class consumers and businesses to invest in greater numbers of cars, vans and lorries.
However, as a study published in the British medical journal The Lancet last week pointed out, economic change sometimes produces harmful behavioural shifts, such as driving faster and further without due regard to safety.
The head of the National Safety Council of India (NSCI), K.C. Gupta, told AFP last September that changing attitudes was a "huge job" but that economic development would lead to more awareness.
India's generally bumpy and overcrowded roads remain poorly policed and chaotic in nature.
Whole families are often found crammed onto a single motorbike -- with only the father wearing a helmet -- while the overloading of trucks and buses is endemic.
A total of 175 people died of starvation and thirst in 2009, 261 in bombings, 25,911 from drowning, 8,539 from electrocution and 1,826 had fatal falls into manholes or pits. Around 8,000 died from snake or other animal bites.
Experts warn that government statistics in India should be treated with caution because of inefficient public administration in many areas, meaning accidents go unreported.
The transfer of additional Rs. 300 billion to Pakistan's agriculture sector during the current fiscal year 2010-2011 by higher prices of agriculture produce and direct flood compensation to 1.6 million affected families at the rate of one hundred thousands rupees each will boost economic confidence in the countryside. It will generate rural demand for consumer items including consumer durables such as fans, TVs, motorcycles, cars, refrigerators, etc.
Already, the upside of the government policy is that Pakistan's rural economy is being spurred by high crop prices that may help the GDP growth this year and next. Increased farm incomes are whetting the rural households' appetite for industrial and consumer goods in 2011 and beyond.
While it is good to see Pakistan's rural farm economy perk up, it is also important to recognize that the overall national economic outlook can not improve significantly unless the growing budget deficits and rising inflation are brought under control. And this will require the ruling feudal elite to pitch in by paying their fair share of income tax on their rising farm incomes. It is time for them to lead by example.
According to details, the total sample size was 300 respondents, five farmers were selected randomly from each village to collect their responses on the survey questions; at some villages 4 or 6 farmers were selected randomly. In district Sukkur, majority of the farmers comprise subsistence farmers as 31pc farmers of district are those who own less than 5 acres of land, while about 34pc farmers holding up to 12.5 acres of land.
Farmers, studied during survey, spend around Rs.1,611 monthly on their children education, with the maximum amount of Rs. 12,000.
Farming is a major component of the district's rural economy as almost all the respondents were engaged in farming. Wheat, rice, cotton and sugarcane are the major crops being cultivated by 93pc, 58pc, 37pc and 12pc of the respondent farmers.
Around 24pc of the respondent farmers are also cultivating fruits including dates, mangoes and bananas. Only 22pc of the respondent farmers are rearing animal (livestock).
Almost half (49pc) of the farmers used privately purchased seeds for wheat cultivation, 33pc of the farmers used their own retained seed and 18pc of the farmers used the seed purchased from Public Sector Seed Corporations.
On the average, a farmer used 96.73 Kg chemical fertilizer per acre with the maximum and minimum of 350 Kg and 40 Kg respectively. The average per acre cost of wheat production was Rs. 10,670/-, based upon the average figures of cost given by respondents of the survey.
All the respondent farmers are using tractor for cultivation and preparing land for crops and few are using tractor for fetching their crop produce to market.
BAMNOD, India — The 50-year-old farmer knew from experience that his onion crop was doomed when torrential rains pounded his fields throughout September, a month when the Indian monsoon normally peters out.
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Mr. Talele’s misfortune, and that of many other farmers here, is a grim reminder of a persistent fact: India, despite its ambitions as an emerging economic giant, still struggles to feed its 1.1 billion people.
Four decades after the Green Revolution seemed to be solving India’s food problems, nearly half of Indian children age 5 or younger are malnourished. And soaring food prices, a problem around the world, are especially acute in India.
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Critics say Indian policy makers have failed to follow up on the country’s investments in agricultural technology of the 1960s and ’70s, as they focused on more glamorous, urban industries like information technology, financial services and construction.
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Food inflation hits especially hard here because Indians — most of whom live on less than $2 a day — spend a bigger portion of their disposable incomes on food than people in other big, developing economies like China and Brazil.
“This is the worst form of taxation on the poorest of the poor,” said Ashok Gulati, Asia director for the International Food Policy Research Institute.
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But experts say the widening gap between agriculture’s anemic supply and the rising demand for food calls for fundamental changes in farming policies.
During the Green Revolution the government invested heavily in rural agriculture, with an emphasis on hybrid seeds, fertilizers and irrigation canals.
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And rural India has far too few temperature-controlled warehouses that could help farmers and the nation build up reserves as a hedge against poor growing seasons.
When Mr. Talele’s vegetables are ready for harvest he immediately takes them to wholesale markets, which are controlled by committees of local traders. “Whatever the market decides, that’s the price we get,” he said.
Indian officials acknowledge that the country needs to increase investment in irrigation, encourage competition in wholesale and retail markets, and provide targeted food subsidies to the poor. And they also have to provide more education and jobs to villagers, so fewer people are forced to live off the land.
Experts say India needs to make changes like some of the ones China made, beginning in the late 1970s, when it started investing heavily in agriculture and eased regulations on farming.
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KARACHI: Pakistan has a potential of at least $50 billion in value-added textile exports if human resource in this sector is fully developed, said Textile Commissioner Muhammad Idrees.
Addressing the closing ceremony of 9th round of apparel manufacturing and management training programme at the Readymade Garments Technical Training Institute, the official said that the present volume of exports was not at all satisfactory.
The stakeholders could easily double this volume by improving skills of workers and through compliance with the standards of buyers, he added.
The skills development programme comprised one-month training, which covered cutting, sewing, production management, industrial engineering and quality control. Experts and consultants from Technopak, a world renowned consultancy firm, were hired for the training.
Thirty-one master trainers or middle management professionals from Artistic Milliners, Naz Textiles, Rajby Industries and Selimpex International and Soorty Enterprises attended the ninth round of training project.
The training project has so far been successfully implemented in 30 factories in Sindh and has trained 279 master trainers/middle management professionals and 3,693 workers.
The project delivered complete training system, course curriculum, manuals and consulting guidelines to the factories. Training manuals are also translated into Urdu language to transfer appropriate knowledge and skills to workers.
Pakistan’s textile sector is optimistic about meeting the annual export target, as high cotton prices in domestic and international markets have caused an increase in prices of value-added textile products, industry people say.
The government had fixed the textile export target at $14 billion for the current fiscal year. Members of the textile sector are of the view that achieving the target is possible, as exports of highly value-added items such as knitwear and garments have increased in terms of value.
Statistics released by the Federal Bureau of Statistics (FBS) show the textile sector has performed well in the first half (July to December) of the current fiscal year, as its exports increased by 25.79 per cent as compared to the corresponding period of the previous year.
The industry, however, believes they would need to import up to five million bales of cotton because the 11 million bales produced so far in the country will not meet the requirements as some of the crop has been destroyed by flood.
The industrialists also expressed reservations about gas shortage in the country that has already caused a huge loss to the industry, particularly in Punjab. All Pakistan Textile Processing Mills Association Chairman Maqsood Ahmad Butt stressed that cotton prices reached Rs13,000 per maund (37.324 kg) and the sector may face a shortage of cotton in June if India did not lift the ban on exports.
“There is a possibility that exports will cross $14 billion target if cotton shortages are met and gas supply is restored,” he opined.
In 2007, cotton was grown in 90 countries. In 2006/07, the four main producing countries were China, India, the USA and Pakistan and accounted for approximately three quarters of world output. If we added Uzbekistan and Brasil, six countries would account for 83% of world cotton production. This concentration in cotton production, which appears to increase for several years, has to be put into perspective by considering the impact of domestic policy reforms in the largest cotton producing countries, as well as climatic and sanitary contingencies.
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The main cotton producing economies also account for a large part of consumption. According to ICAC data, China, the United States, India, and Pakistan as a whole have accounted for approximately more than 55% of global cotton consumption over the period 1980 to 2008. Their overall consumption has risen considerably in volume (see figure below). For example, consumption multiplied by 3 in China and by more than 3 in India. Pakistan has had the largest increase in volume (which multiplied by 6 between 1980 and 2008) in order to responde to export-driven demand for textiles.
These days, India often is held up as an example of how a democracy in Asia can mirror the spectacular growth of authoritarian China. In the year ending March 31, India's economy is expected to expand by about 8.5%.
Other important gauges of national well-being paint a more troubling picture. "What has globalization and industrialization done for India?" asks Mr. Venkatesan, Microsoft's former India chairman. "About 400 million people have seen benefits, and 800 million haven't."
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Calorie consumption by the bottom 50% of the population has been declining since 1987, according to the 2009-10 economic survey conducted by India's Ministry of Finance, even as those at the top of society struggle with rising obesity. Mainly because of malnutrition, around 46% of children younger than 3 years old are too small for their age, according to UNICEF.
Infrastructure in cities and the countryside remains woefully inadequate: In recent years, China has added, on average, more than 10 times as much power as India to its electricity grid each year.
Data from McKinsey & Co. show that the number of households in the highest-earning income bracket, making more than $34,000 a year, has risen to 2.5 million, from 1 million in 2005. But the ranks of those at the bottom, making less than $3,000 a year, also have grown, to 111 million, from 101 million in 2005.
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India's modernization was expected to prompt a mass movement of workers from farms to factory floors—a critical component in the transformation of China, South Korea and other Asian nations. But manufacturing as a share of India's economy stood at 16% in 2009, the same as in 1991, according to the World Bank.
Services have increased dramatically as a proportion of gross domestic product, rising to 55% in 2009, from 45% in 1991, according to the World Bank, becoming the chief engine of India's economic strength. But many of the fastest-growing areas, such as finance and technology, employ relatively few and rely heavily on skilled employees. The entire software and technology-services sector, including call centers and outsourcing, directly employs just 2.5 million workers, a tiny fraction of the overall work force.
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Agriculture's share of the economy, meanwhile, has declined to about 17% in 2009, from 30% in 1991. But the number of people working in agriculture hasn't dropped commensurately, according to Arvind Panagariya, a professor of Indian political economy at Columbia University in New York. "The dependence on agriculture remains incredibly high when you compare India's high-growth phase with others," he says. "The potential of the country is to grow at 11% to 12%, and it's growing only at 8% to 9%."
Frustration over the economic miracle's limited trickle-down is fueling political movements around the country. Most base their appeal, in part, on the idea that the poor are being ill-served in the new India.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703313304576131792120382006.html?KEYWORDS=india
1 Dairy Sector
With an estimated 33 billion litres of annual milk production from 50 million animals, managed by
over 8 million farming households, Pakistan is the 5th largest milk producing country in the world
Livestock sector contributed approximately 53.2 percent of the agriculture value added and 11.4
percent to national GDP during 2009 – 10
The milk economy in terms of value is over 27% of the total Agriculture sector
Additional potential of 3 billion litres of milk, with a growth rate faster than any other sector
Of the total 33 billion litres of milk produced, 71% is rural based and 29% is urban based
Of the total production, around 3% is processed and marketed through formal channels
40% Supply and Demand gap exists in Pakistan.
2 Livestock Sector
Livestock sector contributed approximately 53.2 percent of the agriculture value added and 11.4
percent to national GDP during 2009?10.
Gross value addition of livestock at current factor cost has increased from Rs. 1304.6 billion
(2008?09) to Rs. 1537.5 billion (2009?10) showing an increase of 17.8 percent as compared to the
previous year.
The population growth, increase in per capita income and export revenue is fuelling the demand for
livestock and livestock products.
Pakistan earned USD717 million from leather exports in FY09 and a meagre USD96 million from meat
exports.
Poultry sector is one of the organized and vibrant segments of agriculture industry of Pakistan.
This sector generates employment (direct/indirect) and income for about 1.5 million people.
Poultry meat contributes 23.8 percent of the total meat production in the country
The meat demand for Pakistan Domestic market is growing at a rate of 2.73% for Beef, 2.90 % for
mutton and 6.10 % for poultry.
This domestic demand is growing to meet the population growth, human need for protein and
calcium, migration of population from rural to urban and the fluctuating growth due to per capita rise
in income.
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3 Fisheries Sector
During the period July?March 2009?10 the total marine and inland fish production was estimated
952,735 Million tons out which 667,762 Million tons were marine production and the remaining catch
come from inland waters.
A number of sites have been earmarked on an area of 20,000 acres of land in Districts Thatta &
Badin along the coast.
Immense potential exists to start commercial scale fish/shrimp farming in Sindh.
4 Poultry Sector
Poultry is an important sub – sector of agriculture and has contributed enormously to food production by
playing a vital role in the domestic economy.
Poultry industry can broadly be divided into three
groups, viz. hatchery, poultry farming and feed sectors. This sector generates employment and income
for about 1.5 million people in Pakistan. Its contribution in agriculture growth is 4.81% and in Livestock
growth is 9.84%, whereas, the total poultry meat contributes to 23.8% of the total meat production in
the country.
Pakistan, with a population of 170 Million people, has gone through a sizeable growth in the production
of poultry meat and eggs. Per capita availability went up from 23 in 1991 to 46 eggs in 2009 and poultry
meat availability increased from 1.48kg to 2.88 kg during the same period. In our Country per capita
consumption of meat is only 7 KG and 60-65 eggs annually. Whereas developed world is consuming 41
KG meat and over 300 Eggs per capita per year. According to Industry sources there is capacity of 5,000
Environmental Control Houses in Pakistan and currently only 2,500 houses are working.
The total Poultry population in Pakistan is approximately 610 Million.
•The mass reality in India (which has over 70 per cent of its people living in the rural areas), is that rural India is in the midst of the worst agrarian crisis in four decades. Millions of livelihoods in the rural areas have been damaged or destroyed in the last 15 years as a result of this crisis, because of the predatory commercialisation of the countryside and the reduction of all human values to exchange value. As a result, lakhs of farmers have committed suicide and millions of people have migrated, and are migrating, from the rural areas to the cities and towns in search of jobs that are not there. They have moved towards a status that is neither that of a ‘worker' nor that of a ‘farmer.' Many of them end up as domestic labourers, or even criminals. We have been pushed towards corporate farming, a process in which farming is taken out of the hands of the farmers and put in the hands of corporates. This process is not being achieved with guns, tanks, bulldozers or lathis. It is done by making farming unviable for the millions of small family farm-holders, due to the high cost of inputs such as seed, fertilizer and power, and uneconomical prices.
•India was ranked fourth in the list of countries with the most number of dollar billionaires, but 126th in human development. This means it is better to be a poor person in Bolivia (the poorest nation in South America) or Guatemala or Gabon rather than in India. Here, some 83.6 crore people (of a total of 110-120 crore) in India survive on less than Rs.20 a day.
•Eight Indian States in India are economically poorer than African states, said a recent Oxford University study. Life expectancy in India is lower than in Bolivia, Kazakhstan and Mongolia.
•According to the National Sample Survey Organisation, the average monthly per capita expenditure of the Indian farm household is Rs.503. Of that, some 55 per cent is spent on food, 18 per cent on fuel, clothing and footwear, leaving precious little to be spent on education or health.
•A report of the Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations shows that between 1995-97 and 1999-2001, India added more newly hungry millions than the rest of the world taken together. The average rural family is consuming 100 kg less of food than it was consuming earlier. Indebtedness has doubled in the past decade. Cultivation costs have increased exorbitantly and farming incomes have collapsed, leading to wide-scale suicides by farmers.
•While there were 512 accredited journalists covering the Lakme India Fashion Week event, there were only six journalists to cover farmer suicides in Vidharbha. In that Fashion Week programme, the models were displaying cotton garments, while the men and women who grew that cotton were killing themselves at a distance of an hour's flight from Nagpur in the Vidharbha region. Nobody told that story except one or two journalists, locally.
Is this a responsible way for the Indian media to function? Should the media turn a Nelson's eye to the harsh economic realities facing over 75 per cent of our people, and concentrate on some ‘Potemkin villages' where all is glamour and show business? Are not the Indian media behaving much like Queen Marie Antoinette, who famously said that if people had no bread, they should eat cake.
No doubt, sometimes the media mention farmers' suicides, the rise in the price of essential commodities and so on, but such coverage is at most 5 to 10 per cent of the total. The bulk of the coverage goes to showing cricket, the life of film stars, pop music, fashion parades, astrology…
http://www.hindu.com/2011/06/04/stories/2011060455071000.htm
A quarter of a million Indian farmers have committed suicide in the last 16 years—an average of one suicide every 30 minutes. The crisis has ballooned with economic liberalization that has removed agricultural subsidies and opened Indian agriculture to the global market. Small farmers are often trapped in a cycle of insurmountable debt, leading many to take their lives out of sheer desperation. We speak with Smita Narula of the Center for Human Rights and Global Justice at New York University Law School, co-author of a new report on farmer suicides in India.
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SMITA NARULA: Good morning.
AMY GOODMAN: Talk about this report that you are just releasing today.
SMITA NARULA: Our major finding for this report is that all the issues that you just described are major human rights issues. And what we’re faced with in India is a human rights crisis of epic proportions. The crisis affects the human rights of Indian farmers and their family members in extremely profound ways. We found that their rights to life, to water, food and adequate standard of living, and their right to an effective remedy, is extremely affected by this crisis. Additionally, the government has hard human rights legal obligations to respond to the crisis, but we’ve found that it has failed, by and large, to take any effective measures to address the suicides that are taking place.
AMY GOODMAN: I mean, this number is unbelievable. Thirty—every 30 minutes, an Indian farmer commits suicide?
SMITA NARULA: And that’s been going on for years and years. And what these intense numbers don’t reveal are two things. One is that the numbers themselves are failing to capture the enormity of the problem. In what we call a failure of information on the part of the Indian government, entire categories of farmers are completely left out of the purview of farm suicide statistics, because they don’t formally own title to land. This includes women farmers, Dalit, or so-called lower caste farmers, as well as Adivasi, or tribal community farmers. In addition, the government’s programs and the relief programs that they’ve offered fail to capture not only this broad category, but also fail to provide timely debt relief and compensation or address broader structural issues that are leading to these suicides in the country....
http://www.democracynow.org/2011/5/11/every_30_minutes_crushed_by_debt
http://www.chrgj.org/publications/docs/every30min.pdf
General Secretary Sindh Abadgar Board, Syed Mehmood Nawaz Shah, told The News on Thursday that contrary to outgoing financial year, all crops are likely to record bumper output in 2011-2012 thanks to timely and sufficient availability of water.
He said that the problem is management of the upcoming bumper crops and they fear decline in prices as prices of cotton have gone down in the international market.
Pakistan Central Cotton Committee has set a target of 15 million bales this year. Cotton has a share of 6.9 percent in agriculture and 1.4 percent in GDP.
In 2010/11, major crops declined by four percent and farm sector recorded a modest growth of 1.2 percent.
Cotton and rice production remained low because of floods and rain, but wheat and sugarcane recorded growth, which saved the agriculture sector from negative growth.
Economic Survey of Pakistan 2010-11 said cotton was cultivated on an area of 2,689 thousand hectares, 13.4 percent less than last year (3,106 thousand hectares). The production is estimated at 11.5 million bales, lower by 11.3 percent over the last year’s production of 12.9 million bales and 17.9 percent less than the target of 14 million bales.
The reasons for decrease in production is loss in area under cultivation due to floods, rains, widespread attack of Cotton Leaf Curl Virus (CLCV) and sucking pest in core and non-core area, shortage of water due to canal closure during flood.
Shah said that CLCV attacked cotton in Punjab in the end of June, so this year they have sown early crop, whose results are still not known.
Sugarcane was cultivated on an area of 988,000 hectares, 4.8 percent higher than last year’s level of 943,000 hectares.
Sugarcane production for the year 2010-11 is estimated at 55.3 million tons as against production of 49.3 million tons last year, a rise of 12 percent.
Sugarcane is a major raw material for the production of white sugar and gur and is also a cash crop. Its share in value-added sector of agriculture and GDP is 3.6 percent and 0.8 percent, respectively.
Sources say that better market prices and timely payments by sugar mills encouraged farmers to grow more crop.
Area sown for rice is estimated at 2,365,000 hectares, 17.9 percent less than last year (2,883,000 hectares).
Rice has a share of 4.4 percent in agriculture and 0.9 percent in GDP. Pakistan grows high quality rice to meet both domestic demand and exports.
Rice production is likely to decline by 26 percent to 5 million tons in 2010-11 from 6.8 million tons last year, said a market source.
Rice export from Pakistan would be 2.6 million tons in FY2010-11 as compared with 3.8 million tons in 2009-10.
Rice productivity in Pakistan increased from the 1960s to the 1990s. Since then, it has seen a fall of about one percent per year. Therefore, it could not keep up the pace with growing demand, Ahmad Jawad, CEO of Harvest Trading told The News.
Major reasons for fall in rice production were floods and low market prices last year. Floods attacked mostly paddy growing areas in Sindh.
Area and production target of wheat for 2010-11 had been set at 9,045,000 hectares and 25 million tons, respectively. Wheat was cultivated on 8,805,000 hectares, showing a decrease of 3.6 percent over last year’s area of 9,132,000 hectares. However, a bumper wheat crop of 24.2 million tons has been estimated with 3.9 percent increase over the last year’s crop of 23.3 million tons.
Production of wheat increased due to timely fertiliser use and rainfall during pre-harvesting period.
Wheat is the main staple food for most of the population and largest grain source of the country. It contributes 13.1 percent to the value-added sector of agriculture and 2.7 percent to GDP.
The reforms also unleashed the entrepreneurial spirits of the "caged" Indian. The new economy has thrived - software has become a powerhouse industry. Most importantly, a substantial middle class has come into being between what one political scientist called a "small elite and a large impoverished mass". The newly confident middle class have gleefully abandoned Gandhian austerity for hearty consumerism, splurging on goods and services. India has produced the cheapest car, and offers the cheapest telephone calls, as well as heart and eye surgeries. It weathered the recession gamely, clocking nearly 7% growth during the worst of the downturn. Domestic savings remain robust.
That is where the India reform story comes to a halt, may say. These days, the world's 10th largest economy - which aspires to become the world's third largest by 2030 - is hobbled by what many call "policy paralysis", runaway inflation (nearly double the government's own "tolerable" estimate of 5%-6%) and is snowed under an avalanche of corruption scandals which smack of crony capitalism. Rising oil prices haven't helped matters. Interest rates have risen nearly a dozen times in almost an equal number of months. Spending is down.
But the bigger challenges lie ahead. Many believe that they will eventually decide whether India becomes a highly iniquitous and restive society or a more inclusive, stable one. How fast will the country be able to lift its poorest of the poor - mainly its tribespeople and Dalits (formerly untouchables) - out of poverty? Or will India continue to be a land where there are people "who sell newspapers they will never read, sew clothes they cannot wear, polish cars they will never own and construct buildings where they will never live", as Eduardo Galeano had once said evocatively, writing on a Latin American city.
A third of Indians still live below the poverty line, according to various estimates. A study by C Ravi of the Centre for Economic and Social Studies in Hyderabad actually found that poverty levels in 2009-2010 were 32%, an increase over 2007-2008, possibly due to the recession and severe drought. Other estimates point to a modest drop in poverty in recent years. Even the chief of India's Planning Commission, Montek Singh Ahluwalia, agrees that the drop in poverty is well below the government's own targets.
There are more worries. Half of Indians earn most from their farms, where growth has slowed down worryingly. Lack of access to basic services remains the most worrisome malaise, dragging down India's social indicators. Some 40% of children are suffering from severe malnutrition, more than 45% of them are not fully vaccinated and 41% of women are unable to deliver their children safely. There are worries, too, over the quality of education, with 43% of children dropping out of elementary school by their early teens, according to figures for 2007-2008. More than a third of 8-9 year-olds in villages cannot pass simple tests in reading and arithmetic. So the picture of inclusiveness, in the words of Montek Singh Ahluwalia, remains "mixed". He concedes that "both the extent of poverty and the lack of access to the essential services remain a serious problem".
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-south-asia-14300534
Are millions of Indians being forced to leave their villages for cities and towns because there aren't enough jobs at home and farm incomes are drying up? Is this "distress migration" unprecedented in India's history?
Award-winning journalist P Sainath thinks so. Examining the latest census data, he finds that India's urban population has risen more (91 million more than in the 2001 census) than the rural population (90.6 million more than in the 2001 census). Nearly half the people in states like Tamil Nadu already live in urban settlements.
The last time, writes Mr Sainath, the rise in India's urban population exceeded the rise of the rural population was 90 years ago and reflected in the 1921 census. The decline in rural population then could be possibly linked to the 1918 flu pandemic that killed several million people.
This time around, Mr Sainath says, the increase in migration is driven by the "collapse of millions of livelihoods in agriculture and its related occupations". He writes that massive migrations "have gone hand-in-hand with a deepening agrarian crisis": more than 240,000 farmers, mostly broken by debt, committed suicide in India between 1995 and 2009.
'Despair-driven'
Mr Sainath has spent a lifetime reporting on distressed farmers and how the poor live in India. He admits that the census is not equipped to examine the complexity of migration in India. In a fast urbanising country, rising migration from villages to cities and towns is natural. Also, newer "urban areas" are being added all the time. The big picture is also not strikingly unusual. According to the census, 31.16% of Indians live in urban areas, up from 27.81% in 2001 - a rate which is actually significantly lower than the rate in many developing countries with similar income levels.
But, argues Mr Sainath, these "natural" factors which triggered migration from villages to cities have been valid in the earlier decades too when additions to the village population actually outstripped those to the cities. So why is the last decade throwing up a radically different result?...
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There may be other pressing questions to ponder. How does India cope with its increasing urban population? Its cities are choking under power cuts, scarcity of water and polluted air. Also the increase of new urban settlements with poor amenities and limited access to jobs could easily lead to massive social unrest among the migrants in the new "cities". Which could actually end up wrecking India's cities faster than its villages.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-south-asia-15056418
NEW DELHI — Ram Babu’s last days were typical in India’s growing rash of suicides.
The poor farmer’s crop failed and he defaulted on the $6,000 loan he had taken to buy a tractor. The bank’s collectors hounded him, even hiring drummers to go round the village drawing attention to his shame.
“My father found it unbearable. He was an honorable man and he couldn’t take the humiliation. The next day he hanged himself from a tree on his farm,” his son Ram Gulam said Friday.
Babu’s suicide went unreported in local newspapers, just another statistic in a country where more than 15 people kill themselves every hour, according to a new government report.
The report released late Thursday said nearly 135,000 people killed themselves in the country of 1.2 billion last year, a 5.9 percent jump in the number of suicides over the past year.
The suicide rate increased to 11.4 per 100,000 people in 2010 from 10.9 the year before, according to the statistics from the National Crime Records Bureau.
Financial difficulties and debts led to most of the male suicides while women were driven to take their lives because of domestic pressures, including physical and mental abuse and demands for dowry.
A 2008 World Health Organization report ranked India 41st for its suicide rate, but because of its huge population it accounted for 20 percent of global suicides.
The largest numbers of suicides were reported from the southern Indian states of Kerala, Tamil Nadu, Andhra Pradesh and Karnataka, where tens of thousands of impoverished farmers have killed themselves after suffering under insurmountable debts.
The loans — from banks and loan sharks — were often used to buy seeds and farm equipment, or to pay large dowries to get their daughters married. But a bad harvest could plunge the farmer over the edge.
Sociologists say the rapid rise in incomes in India’s booming economy has resulted in a surge in aspirations as well among the lower and middle classes, and the failure to attain material success can trigger young people to suicide.
“The support that traditionally large Indian families and village communities offered no longer exists in urban situations. Young men and women move to the cities and find they have no one to turn to for succor in times of distress,” said Abhilasha Kumari, a sociology professor in New Delhi.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/asia-pacific/government-report-says-15-people-commit-suicide-every-hour-in-india/2011/10/28/gIQAVFGWOM_story.html
LAHORE, PAKISTAN — In the Pakistani village of Sharbaga, about 130 kilometers from Lahore, a 70-year-old farmer named Mohammed Ali and his wife plant rice seedlings in a wide field. They stand ankle-deep in muddy water holding thin green leaves that they deftly press into the ground. It is hard work under a blazing sun, but this seemingly mundane task is a significant development that can help rural Pakistanis improve their lives.
Just a few years ago, this rice paddy and most of the surrounding fields in this village of 5,000 were barren. For decades the land has lain fallow because it is saline from poor groundwater.
In 2006, the government of the state of Punjab, traditionally Pakistan’s breadbasket, and the United Nations Development Program started an agriculture project to rehabilitate saline farmland by treating it with gypsum. The Punjab government pays for two-thirds of the project’s six-year, $17 million budget, while the U.N. program pays for the rest.
Nearly six million hectares, or about 15 million acres, across Pakistan, including 2.3 million hectares in Punjab, are barren because of salinity and water logging. Gypsum’s calcium composition can neutralize saline soil. Within a season of applying the white powder, farmers like Mr. Ali had transformed a long-degraded land into a field that yielded bountiful crops of rice and wheat.
Forty-three percent of Pakistan’s population of 170 million depends on agriculture for their livelihood and two-thirds of the country’s citizens live in rural areas. Projects that help improve the lives of people on the ground are critical to creating stability in Pakistan, and yet these are often overlooked.
Sustainable agricultural growth is a “necessary condition for rural growth, employment generation, poverty reduction and social stability,” said a 2009 report on Pakistan’s agricultural potential by Weidemann Associates, an economic development consulting firm near Washington. The report was prepared for the U.S. Agency for International Development in Pakistan.
The biosaline project in Punjab has already helped lift 50,000 households out of poverty by raising incomes. From 2007 to 2010, the increase of rice and wheat production on rehabilitated land totaled 417,016 tons, worth $122 million.
Dozens of enthusiastic farmers who gathered to meet a visitor to Sharbaga this past summer were unequivocal about how the agriculture project had improved their lives. Before the project, there were few ways to make money in the village aside from sporadic manual labor. Farmers owned small parcels of largely infertile land, and most of the men migrated to cities for work in factories or as temporary laborers.
Now, all the men said their farming incomes had double or tripled, to as much as $230 a month, compared with the $90 or less that they could earn working in a factory, and migration to the cities is declining.
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Reviving agriculture has been life-changing for many rural Pakistanis. Zeba Bibi, who also cultivates a garden in Liliani village, wants to know how she can make her mango trees healthier and more productive. She aspires to one day buy a tractor with extra income from crops grown on her family’s desalinated land. “We are looking forward to a better life,” she said.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/17/business/energy-environment/soil-renewal-puts-pakistans-poor-on-stronger-ground.html
Huntsman Textile Effects, a Singapore-based global provider of high-quality dyes and chemicals to the textile and related industries, has opened its 13th Formulation & Distribution Center, in Karachi, Pakistan.
The 43,000-square-foot facility boasts state-of-the-art equipment and new technology to bolster Huntsman TE’s competitiveness and presence in the Pakistan market. The center is located at the Landhi Industrial Area. Pakistan represents a fast-growing market of increasing importance for Huntsman TE and the launch of this facility strengthens the firm’s commitment to it.
“With the opening of our new, low-cost production facility for formulated chemicals in Karachi to meet increasing local demand, we will considerably increase our competitiveness and flexibility in textile chemicals in this key Asian textile market,” said Paul Hulme, president of Huntsman TE. “Our well-established partner, Swisstex, will continue to provide enhanced sales activities, enabling us to concentrate on all formulation and production aspects using our cutting-edge technology to develop innovative products and technologies, market solutions with intelligent effects to this growing market."
Huntsman specializes in products and technologies with intelligent effects, such as built-in freshness, sun protection or dyes to reduce water and energy consumption. It has operations in 110 countries. The company had 2010 revenues of more than $9 billion.
http://www.wwd.com/markets-news/textiles/huntsman-textiles-opens-pakistan-facility-5398415
In the first chapter of his bestseller on globalization, The World Is Flat, three-time Pulitzer Prize–winning foreign affairs columnist for The New York Times Thomas Friedman suggests that his repertoire of achievements also includes being heir to Christopher Columbus. According to Friedman, he has followed in the footsteps of the fifteenth-century icon by making an unexpected discovery regarding the shape of the world during an encounter with “people called Indians.”
Friedman’s Indians reside in India proper, of course, not in the Caribbean, and include among their ranks CEO Nandan Nilekani of Infosys Technologies Limited in Bangalore, where Friedman has come in the early twenty-first century to investigate phenomena such as outsourcing and to exult over the globalization-era instructions he receives at the KGA Golf Club downtown: “Aim at either Microsoft or IBM.” Nilekani unwittingly plants the flat-world seed in Friedman’s mind by commenting, in reference to technological advancements enabling other countries to challenge presumed American hegemony in certain business sectors: “Tom, the playing field is being leveled.”
The Columbus-like discovery process culminates with Friedman’s conversion of one of the components of Nilekani’s idiomatic expression into a more convenient synonym: “What Nandan is saying, I thought to myself, is that the playing field is being flattened… Flattened? Flattened? I rolled that word around in my head for a while and then, in the chemical way that these things happen, it just popped out: My God, he’s telling me the world is flat!”
No compelling justification is ever provided for how a war against deterrables will solve the problem of undeterrables who by definition cannot be deterred.
The viability of the new metaphor has already been called into question by Friedman’s assessment two pages prior to the flat-world discovery that the Infosys campus is in fact “a different world,” given that the rest of India is not characterized by things like a “massive resort-size swimming pool” and a “fabulous health club.” No attention is meanwhile paid to the possibility that a normal, round earth—on which all circumferential points are equidistant from the center—might more effectively convey the notion of the global network Friedman maintains is increasingly equalizing human opportunity.
An array of disclaimers and metaphorical qualifications begins to surface around page 536, such that it ultimately appears that the book might have been more appropriately titled The World Is Sometimes Indefinitely Maybe Partially Flat—But Don’t Worry, I Know It’s Not, or perhaps The World Is Flat, Except for the Part That Is Un-Flat and the Twilight Zone Where Half-Flat People Live. As for his announcement that “unlike Columbus, I didn’t stop with India,” Friedman intends this as an affirmation of his continued exploration of various parts of the globe and not as an admission of his continuing tendency to err—which he does first and foremost by incorrectly attributing the discovery that the earth is round to the geographically misguided Italian voyager.
Leaving aside for the moment the blunders that plague Friedman’s writing, the comparison with Columbus is actually quite apt in other ways, as well. For instance, both characters might be accused of transmitting a similar brand of hubris, nurtured by their respective societies, according to which “the Other” is permitted existence only via the discoverer-hero himself. While Columbus is credited with enabling preexisting populations on the American continent to enter the realm of true existence by reporting them to European civilization, Friedman assumes responsibility for the earth’s inhabitants in general without literally having to encounter them.
http://www.guernicamag.com/features/3284/fernandez_12_1_11/
A new book on the influential New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman sets out to debunk his hawkish, neo-liberal views, accusing him of overt racism, factual errors and skewed judgments on issues ranging from the United States invasion of Iraq to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Deconstructing one of the country's highest-paid journalists, Belen Fernandez's The Imperial Messenger: Thomas Friedman at Work presents a comprehensive overview of the man - and three-time Pulitzer Prize winner - she describes as "characterized by reduction of complex international phenomena to simplistic rhetoric and theorems that rarely withstand the test of reality".
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The Imperial Messenger looks at Friedman's obsession with US global dominance, his Orientalism vis-a-vis the Arab/Muslim world, and his special relationship with Israel.
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Fernandez explained that the first chapter, "America", incorporates Friedman's "cheerleading of punitive economic systems at home and abroad" while the "Special Relationship" chapter delves into the inconsistencies of his persona as a serious critic of the Jewish state.
"His criticism, of course, is limited to intermittently encouraging the Israelis to slightly curtail settlements," Fernandez told Inter Press Service (IPS). "Not because he cares about the plight of non-settlers, but because he wants to avoid a situation in which Palestinians demand equal rights in a multiethnic democracy."
As an example, Fernandez cites his advocacy of the war in Iraq "to create a free, open and progressive model in the heart of the Arab/Muslim world to promote the ideas of tolerance, pluralism and democratization".
She says Friedman wrote this after having said in 2002 that "unless the US encourage(s) alternative energies that will slowly bring the price of oil down and force Arab/Muslim countries to open up and adapt to modernity - we can invade Iraq once a week and it's not going to unleash democracy in the Arab world".
In the same year, Friedman classifies the invasion of Iraq as "the most important task worth doing and worth debating", even while admitting that it "would be a huge, long, costly task - if it is doable at all, and I am not embarrassed to say that I don't know if it is".
In the "Arab/Muslim World" chapter, she quotes Friedman as concluding that the "short answer" for why the US invaded Iraq and Afghanistan in response to 9/11 "is because Pakistan has nukes that we fear and Saudi Arabia has oil that we crave".
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After stripping down columns, articles and his books, Fernandez said her perception of Friedman worsened from beginning to end.
"I realized how truly criminal his behavior is, whereas before I had thought of him more as a somewhat amusing purveyor of mixed metaphors who had by accident ascended to the post of New York Times foreign affairs columnist," she told IPS.
"The New York Times is totally complicit in Friedman's crimes, just as it was complicit in selling the whole business of the Iraq war. The degenerate state of the mainstream media, which actively sides with corporate profit over human life, is simply a testament to the importance of alternative media outlets."
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Global_Economy/ML10Dj01.html
Pakistan Agribusiness service provides proprietary medium term price forecasts for key commodities, including corn, wheat, rice, sugar, cocoa, coffee, soy and milk; in addition to newly-researched competitive intelligence on leading agribusiness producers, traders and suppliers; in-depth analysis of latest industry developments; and essential industry context on Pakistan's agribusiness service.
Pakistan's agricultural output has steadily declined in its contribution to GDP in the past decade, down from 24.0% in 2000/01 to 20.9% in 2010/11. That said, the sector still employs the largest number of workers in the population and we expect the industry to remain a government priority as the country deals with issues of food security and the vulnerability to natural disasters. Over the long term, we foresee the dairy, poultry and wheat industries as benefiting the most from increased investment.
However, despite the existing network of irrigation systems across the country, we believe that significant improvements in infrastructure and better supply chains will have to be implemented in order for the country to reap the full benefits of its fertile soil.
Key Trends
- Rice production out to 2015/16: 7.5% to 7.3mn tonnes. We expect the country to increase its share in the basmati rice trade as production expands over our forecast period.
- Wheat consumption out to 2016: 14.2% to 25.3mn tonnes. Consumption growth will be driven by rising incomes and population growth, as well as increased access to good-quality milk.
- Sugar production out to 2015/16: 35.1% to 4.8mn tonnes. Large-scale consumers such as confectioners, candy makers and soft drink manufacturers account for about 60% of the total sugar demand and will be the main drivers of growth.
- 2012 Real GDP Growth: 3.8% (up from 2.4% y-o-y in 2011; forecast to average 3.7% from 2011 to 2016).
- Consumer Price Inflation: 11.2% average in 2012 (down from 13.7% in 2011).
- Central Bank Policy Rate: 12.0% (lower than 14.0% in 2011)
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South Asia rice exporters should benefit the most from the recent rice trade disruptions out of Thailand. So far, traders report that more than 100,000 tonnes of rice for export have been stalled as a result of the country's worst flooding in decades. Some sources estimate that this could rise to more than 300,000 tonnes. Given these developments, the spotlight has now turned to South Asia to meet demand for the grain in the near term.
Despite the recent floods, which destroyed approximately 20-30% of the sugarcane crop in the Sindh region, we forecast 2011/12 sugar output from Pakistan at 4.1mn tonnes, 2.5% up from our previous estimates. This is largely due to an overall 5-8% increase in sugarcane yields, area harvested and favourable monsoon rains during the growing season. Sugar crushing is estimated at 82% and sugar recovery at 8.8%. According to provincial reports, higher sugar prices farmers received last year, coupled with strong demand from the industrial sector, have boosted planting in the provinces of Punjab, Sindh and Khyber Pakhtunkhawah.
http://www.researchandmarkets.com/research/b503cb/pakistan_agribusin
The textile sector is likely to fetch more than $45 million export orders during three-day 9th Textile Asia 2012 International Exhibition, textile experts said Saturday.
During previous international event in 2011, Pakistan fetched more than $31 million worth of orders for different categories of textile products, they added.
Adviser to Prime Minister on Textile Dr Mirza Ikhtiar Baig inaugurated the 9th Textile Asia 2012 event at Karachi Expo Centre.
It is the largest annual textile and garment machinery show of textile industry of Pakistan.
This year more than 276 exhibitors from 39 countries representing 369 international brands are participating in the event.
Besides a large number of textile sector’s representatives along with 271 foreign delegates are attending the exhibition.
The demand for textiles in the world is around $18 trillion, which is likely to be increased by 6.5 percent. China is the leading textile exporter of the world’s total exports of $400 billion.
Export of China stands at $55 billion, Hong Kong $38 billion, Korea $35 billion, Taiwan $16 billion, and Indonesia and Pakistan $14 billion.
Pakistan has emerged as one of the major cotton textile product suppliers in the world market with a share of world yarn trade of about 30 percent and cotton fabric about 8.0 percent, having total export of $13.8 billion, which accounts for only 1.2 percent of the overall share. Out of this cotton fabric is 0.02 percent, made-ups 0.18 percent and garments is 0.15 percent.
Textile sector is the backbone of the country’s economy having 56 percent of total exports and 38 percent job creation in the manufacturing sector. Nearly all the world-renowned brands are manufactured in Pakistan keeping high standard of international quality and competitiveness.
Pakistan is the fourth largest producer of cotton yarn and cloth in the world after China, which is number one besides, Pakistan ranks second in export of yarn and third in export of cloth and fourth largest producer and consumer of raw cotton.
The textile sector in 2011 has registered an impressive growth of 38 percent and it was expected after European Union’s (EU) duty free export of 75 products from Pakistan out of which 65 are textile products, the sector would fetch more than $25 billion export target. The EU facility is initially for two years, extendable for third year after which Pakistan would quality for Generalised System of Preferences (GSP) plus status to export duty free to EU as per revised criteria agreed with EU.
http://www.dailytimes.com.pk/default.asp?page=2012\03\11\story_11-3-2012_pg5_12
There has been a substantial increase of more than 25 percent in arrival of cotton in Pakistan markets this season compared to last season.
Besides, there has also been a significant rise of 77 percent year-on-year in cotton exports from Pakistan this season.
Citing figures from Pakistan Cotton Ginners Association (PCGA), Mr. Muhammad Azam, Secretary-General and Chief Operating Officer of All Pakistan Textile Mills Association (APTMA), told fibre2fashion, “Compared to total arrivals of 11,502,408 cotton bales of 170 kg each during 2010-11 season up to March 1, 2011, a total of 14,378,962 bales have arrived in market this season up to March 1, 2012. Thus, there has been an increase of 2,876,534 bales or 25.01 percent over the previous season.”
Informing about the number of cotton bales pressed by various ginneries across Pakistan, he says, “Up to March 1, 2012, this season, 14,301,516 bales were pressed at various ginneries. In comparison, 11,467,821 bales were pressed during the same period in 2010-11 season. Thus, 2,833,695 bales or 24.71 percent more bales have been pressed this season.”
Talking about cotton exports, he says, “The exports have boomed 77.89 percent this season. Pakistan exported 920,706 bales up to March 1 this season, against exports of 517,567 bales registered during the same period last season. Thus, 403,139 more bales have been exported this season.”
“The textile mills in Pakistan have consumed only 17.68 percent or 1,871,840 more bales this season compared to previous season. Up to March 1, 2012, textile mills in Pakistan purchased 12,462,112 cotton bales, against their purchase of 10,590,272 bales during the same period in 2010-11 season,” he mentions.
http://www.fibre2fashion.com/news/textile-news/newsdetails.aspx?news_id=109064
Chaudhary Maqsood Elahi, a Pakistani exporter of knitted garments, spent two years trying to save his factory in the textile hub of Faisalabad. He sold his house, cut down on staff and switched to air shipments to meet orders on time. It didn’t work.
About six months ago, Elahi, whose Dilkhush Hosiery Mills Ltd. produced t-shirts for European mega-retailers Carrefour SA and Metro AG, shut down his 15-year old factory after booking losses for two straight years. He fired 550 workers, tore down his plant and divided the land into plots that he put up for sale to help repay loans, Bloomberg Businessweek reports in its April 30 issue.
“I kept running the factory despite losses in the hope of finding a way out but the financial burden kept growing,” said Elahi, 56.
Pakistan has one of the largest textile industries in the world, shipping 1.3 trillion rupees ($13.8 billion) worth of textiles in the year ended June 30 mostly to the U.S. and Europe. Textiles account for 63 percent of Pakistan’s exports and mills employ 20 percent of the nation’s workforce. Faisalabad, which generates the most tax revenue after Karachi, accounts for half of all textiles shipped from Pakistan.
The Pakistani textile industry has had a golden opportunity to capture markets lost by Chinese producers because of rising wage pressures in China and the appreciation of the yuan. But according to the Pakistan central bank’s annual economic report for the year ended June 30, 2011, the local industry hasn’t been able to seize the advantage.
Bangladesh, Cambodia
Instead, Bangladesh and Cambodia have increased sales of apparel as Pakistani manufacturers struggle with energy shortages, the report says.
Power blackouts last as long as 20 hours at a stretch in Faisalabad, while shortages of natural gas, which power the looms, can go on for six days at a time. Demand for natural gas exceeds supply by as much as 15 percent in the city.
Half the city’s 250,000 power looms have gone out of business in the past 12 months, 10 percent of the spinning mills and fabric printing units have shut down and half of the remaining plants are struggling to survive, says Muzammil Sultan, president of the Faisalabad Chamber of Commerce and Industry. At least 200,000 workers have lost their jobs since last year. “We’re shipping only half the quantity we used to from this city,” Sultan says.
Cotton Belt
Faisalabad, a city of 5 million people surrounded by Pakistan’s biggest cotton belt, was once known for attracting workers from across the Punjab province to run its weaving mills, spinning units and garment factories.
Now, as the textile business faces its biggest ever crisis, workers have begun leaving the city for the first time. “I’ve already moved my family back to Peshawar and if I can’t make this new tire repair business work, I will also move and try to find some other work,” says Sher Shah Khattak, who came to Faisalabad 35 years ago to work in the textile trade and lost his job as a loom operator last year.
In March, thousands of textile workers came out on the streets of the city, burned tires and shouted slogans against the government. “The change in the city is visible with just 10 percent of factories closed, and we see rioting by workers because of the growing frustration,” says Sheikh Abdul Qayyum, managing partner of Em Que Fabrics in Faisalabad. “We can’t imagine what would happen if half of all mills stop working.”..
http://www.businessweek.com/news/2012-04-25/pakistan-s-city-of-looms-turns-silent-as-mills-close
KARACHI:
After making more than Rs2 billion in the same quarter last year, Lotte Pakistan PTA profits nosedived 93% to Rs151 million amid falling prices of its primary product during January to March 2012.
The massive decline was on account of reduced primary margins amid oversupply of the product emerging in the Asian PTA (purified terephthalic acid) industry.
PTA is widely used in making polyester fibres along with food and beverage containers. Polyester fibres are used to make fabrics for apparel and home furnishings such as bed sheets and curtains. It is also spun together with natural fibres such as cotton to produce a cloth with improved properties such as wrinkle resistance.
Demand from the PSF sector has shifted towards cotton amid bumper crop and lower prices.
The result is still better than market expectation as analysts expected the company to post a loss. The stock value increased by Rs0.16 to Rs8.79 at the Karachi Stock Exchange on Tuesday.
PTA prices fell 18% to average $1,190 per ton in the review period compared with US$1,457 per ton in the same quarter last year.
Overall gross margins dipped to 2% compared with 24% in the same quarter last year.
Reduced earnings also attributed to 52% decline in interest income to Rs130 million against Rs272 million in the period under review. The company’s cash balance has declined due to capital expenditure associated with its power project.
http://tribune.com.pk/story/369985/corporate-results-lotte-pakistan-profits-fall-from-billions-to-millions/
everal cotton spinning companies in Pakistan are investing in value-addition as well as in compact yarns to beat the economic downtrend and to survive.
The excessive power and gas shortages is also forcing the high power consuming spinning industry to go for innovative value-added products that consume less energy.
Mr. Abid Farooq, Managing Director of Ali Akbar Spinning Mills and former chairman of APTMA, told fibre2fashion, “A lot spinning units are investing hugely into compact spinning nowadays and every conventional non-compact spinning mill is investing some money in compact yarns.”
Explaining the reason, he says, “Pakistan has a certain share in world yarn market, which is not likely to increase in near future. There is too much competition and the spinners cannot increase their capacity to export as the yarn export market is limited.”
“On the other hand, there is still a lot of room for the value-added yarn products to get higher market share compared to yarn. So, that is one reason for several spinners diversifying into manufacturing of downstream products. They have invested in value-addition to get a greater share in the Chinese and the European markets,” he adds.
Pakistan is facing a huge shortage of power, electricity and gas, which prevents addition of new capacities in spinning industry. Spinning machines require a lot of energy, so spinners are moving into value-added areas that need less energy.
As Mr. Farooq says, “Making new investments for manufacturing of value-added downstream products is another form of survival for the Pakistan spinning industry because spinning in itself is a very competitive industry and it is very technical. So, most of the new investments are going into value-addition.”
Talking about the knitwear sector, he avers, “The knitwear sector is coming back to life from a very bad slump a few years ago. Several knitwear units that had closed down are being revived again. The increase in dyeing and finishing capacities is also helping the sector.”
http://www.fibre2fashion.com/news/textile-news/newsdetails.aspx?news_id=110648
Telenor Pakistan, in partnership with the Government of Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa, will provide agriculture and livestock information to farmers in the province.
In addition, farmers will be offered the Easypaisa platform to trade in agricultural commodities. Information will be provided via push SMS, voice recordings and small community gatherings.
The aim is to benefit farmers — especially small farmers — by providing them relevant and timely information, and the ability to carry out related mobile transactions on their handsets. All information will be provided by the Government of Khyber-Pakhtunkhawa while Telenor Pakistan will act as the distribution channel of the information. A pilot project will initially be run in Mardan district.
To mark the occasion an MoU signing ceremony was arranged at a local hotel. Arbab Muhammad Ayub Jan, Minister for Agriculture, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa was the chief guest. The MoU was signed by Roar Bjaerum, Vice President Financial Services, Telenor Pakistan and Arbab Muhammad Ayub Jan, Minister for Agriculture, Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa.
Roar Bjaerum, in his comments, highlighted the benefits the project will bring to the farmers of the province. “We will provide farmers the information they need to grow better crops and to raise hardy livestock. By doing so, we want to help them make more informed decisions when it comes to agriculture and livestock planning and trading. This way we hope to contribute toward alleviating poverty and empowering farmers economically. We will also offer mobile branchless banking solutions to enable farmers to carry out transactions right on their mobile phones through Easypaisa.”
Ayub Jan in his remarks spoke about the partnership between Telenor Pakistan and the Government of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa’s Agriculture, Livestock and Cooperative Department (ALCD). He said: “The Department has the mandate of promoting the interests of agriculture and livestock farmers in the province of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. It has undertaken various initiatives to modernize the sector, and to augment the dissemination of relevant information to farmers to help increase production. Our partnership with Telenor Pakistan is another step in this direction. We are ready to offer all the support it needs to achieve its goals for this project.”
Small farmers, living in far-flung areas, are usually isolated from market information which may help them in dealing with commodity whole sellers (‘beopari’ and ‘arthis). They also do not have immediate access to information about best practices in agriculture and livestock rearing.
Telenor Pakistan’s project will help farmers in getting the information they need to increase yield through access to best quality commodities, latest agri trends, information on judicious use of pesticides and fertilizers, best breed of livestock, new methods of disease control, and quality feed and fodder.
http://www.thenewstribe.com/2012/04/18/telenor-to-partner-with-kp-to-provide-agri-information-to-farmers/
All Pakistan Textile Mills Association (APTMA), with over 50 percent ($14.8 billion) contribution to the total national exports ($25 billion) and 78 percent share in the textile exports of the country, is the largest trade union of Pakistan as well as contributor to the national economy of the country.
Due to effective policies and leadership of APTMA, this year cotton production increased to 15 million bales despite two million bales lost due to floodwaters, as compared to the last year’s 11.7 million bales, thus making Pakistan self-sufficient in cotton sector for the first time in 10 years.
To rid the country of energy crisis, the association is actively engaged with various stakeholders, including the Sui Northern Gas Pipeline Limited (SNGPL), Petroleum and Gas Ministry and standing committees of the National Assembly. Out of 300 days, gas remained closed for 156 days causing loss of $5 billion cotton to production capacity of the country. Advocating the case effectively with the government, the association ensured five days a week gas supply to the industry, besides getting electricity load shedding exemption.
The association’s proposal of levying gas surcharge for gas exploration and laying of new pipelines was accepted. The APTMA leadership and members are also advocating for the Vision 2020 to resolve the gas crisis and sustainable growth of the energy sector, while clarifying how much energy is going to be produced from hydel, coal and other sources besides gas exploration. The association believes that only a futuristic vision can ensure affordable energy for the industry as well as domestic sector of the country.
APTMA group leader Gohar Ejaz said their strong advocacy for the free market mechanism during 2010-11 helped transfer Rs 400 million to Pakistani cotton farmers, equal to their income of eight years, and in the wake of price increase in the international market, remained the biggest contribution of APTMA for the welfare of the stakeholders. He said farmers got prosperity, which resulted in value addition to the crop and an increase of $5 billion export. While in 2011-12, resolving the energy crisis for the Punjab industry remained one of the biggest contributions of APTMA, he said.
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Research and development is the key to survival and growth of any industry. Realising this aspect, APTMA has made it a law to collect Rs 20 per cotton bale from the mills to spend this amount on research through Pakistan Central Cotton Committee (PCCC), a semi-autonomous body, with the federal minister for textile industry as its president. Last year, APTMA contributed Rs 300 million, as collected against the production of 15 million cotton bales in the country.
APTMA is also fulfilling its corporate social responsibility towards promotion of textile education in Pakistan. The association established textile colleges in Faisalabad, Karachi and other cities, which were later handed over to the government.
Established since 1957, APTMA is the premier textile industry association having 350 member mills and offices in Lahore, Karachi, Islamabad and Peshawar. Although textile sector has a total 14 associations of various stakeholders, APTMA is the only body, which is taking up the case of whole sector to provincial, national and international level for the growth of the sector – from farmer to exporters.
Textile industry contributes 8.5 percent of the GDP, while APTMA is 50 percent of 8.5 percent textile contribution towards GDP. APTMA provides direct employment to one million workforce as well as three million indirect jobs.
Pakistan is the fourth largest cotton producer in the world as 98 percent of 15 million cotton bales produced in Pakistan are consumed by APTMA members.
http://www.dailytimes.com.pk/default.asp?page=2012\05\07\story_7-5-2012_pg7_5
Leading economists and entrepreneurs from other sectors at a discussion program titled ‘What is wrong with Pakistan’s economy?’, regretted the textile-specific approach of Pakistan’s economic planners that had led to the exclusion of other more lucrative sectors like engineering, information technology, mining and fuel, and agricultural products.
“Pakistan should look beyond textiles to ensure sustained exports and economic growth,” they claimed “as textiles, with only a 5.6 percent share in the total global trade, limit the opportunities for broad based growth. And textiles are also the first casualty in a recession.” Engineering entrepreneur Almas Hyder appealed to the government to have a wider vision and make a paradigm shift in its industrial policy. He said that attention should now be focused on sunrise industries like engineering, chemicals, bio-technology, IT, agriculture-livestock and pharmaceuticals.
Almas said that the government should realign its economy as well as its resource allocation to ensure uninterrupted growth. If these sectors had been given equal importance as that given to textiles, it would have shielded the economy from the ups and downs in a global economy. He said that in a recession, the first expense that people cut down on is of clothing, which is the reason that the textile trade has always come under stress in case of a global or regional recession, as the one being witnessed in Europe these days.
Senior Economist Naveed Anwar Khan pointed out that manufacturing and engineering goods account for 67.50 percent of the total global trade, while mining and fuel account for over 12 percent, agricultural products 10 percent and non-ferrous metals 1.8 percent. Instead of giving attention to around 94 percent of the global trade, Pakistan was only concentrating on the 5.6 percent textile’s trade.
He averred that this preference and attention bestowed on this sector, in the form of energy and power, has not paid any dividends as Pakistan’s share in the total global textile trade remained less than 2 percent. And that even Bangladesh, which had entered the textile sector in the early 1990s, had higher textile exports than Pakistan. He summed up that while the textile sector should be facilitated by the state, other sectors should also be given equal importance.
“Value addition in engineering goods is much higher than the value addition in textiles” stated Iftikhar Ali Malik, former president Federation of Pakistan Chambers of Commerce and Industry. He elaborated that auto parts made from plastic, steel or even cardboard fetched a much higher price than the cost of their raw materials. While 70 percent of the input cost was cotton in yarn manufacturing, in a car filter or a plastic or steel auto part, the cost of the card board, plastic or steel was10-20 percent and the value addition was high.
He regretted the fact that the engineering goods manufacturers were not facilitated by the state in the same way as textiles were by them. The added that the engineering industry has a long gestation period and is more entitled to concessional credit than textiles.
http://www.thenews.com.pk/Todays-News-3-114084-Preferential-treatment-of-textiles-decried
TSR Subramanian said he launched GM cotton in 1990s and the decision was responsible for suicide of thousands of cotton farmers.
http://www.news18.com/news/india/ex-cabinet-secy-regrets-introducing-gm-cotton-in-india-1469313.html
Former Cabinet secretary TSR Subramanian on Friday said that he regrets having allowed Genetically Modified (GM) cotton in the country over two decades ago.
"In 1990s, I introduced GM cotton in India. Twenty years later, I regret...I am responsible for suicide of thousands of cotton farmers," Subramanian said at a panel discussion at a book launch function.
Subramanian, a 1961 batch IAS officer, further said that most European countries and Japan don't allow GM crops. Talking about the performance of the Narendra Modi government, Subramanian said, "This government has done wonderful work in three years. I believe that the present dispensation should get 10 years."
"Failures of India can largely attributed to IAS class...Blame also should go to economists of India who studied in Harvard, Oxford University and now working for the Government of India but don't know anything about India," he said.
https://tribune.com.pk/story/1484291/cpec-provides-avenues-target-100b-chinese-agri-market/
The China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) is a golden opportunity for overall development of this region and Pakistan should reorganise its agriculture sector to get a major slice of the $100 billion worth of agriculture produce imports by China, suggested Muhammad Mehmood, Punjab Agriculture Secretary.
Speaking at the launch of a study on “CPEC – Prospects & Challenges for Agriculture”, Mehmood pointed out that nearly one-fourth of the world’s population was living in China and most of its exports would be routed through Pakistan after the completion of CPEC. “Containers full of exportable surplus will be sent to various international markets, but on their return, these containers will be empty and we must capitalise on the opportunity to export our surplus agriculture produce to China,” he said.
Mehmood revealed that per capita income of China was increasing substantially, bringing a visible change in people’s lifestyle and food habits there. “Like other affluent societies, they also prefer rich and costly food and fruits,” he said, adding Pakistan could get maximum benefit of the emerging change.
“We are concentrating on high-value crops and a 10-year programme has been evolved to develop one lakh acres of land in the Potohar region for planting grape and other high-value crops.”
Major Chinese importers will also be invited to utilise this land for growing high-value fruits in addition to developing the agriculture processing industry on modern scientific lines.
“Its trickle-down effect will provide an opportunity to our farmers to upgrade their technologies and develop agriculture as a profitable business by shunning centuries-old practices,” Mehmood said.
He told the audience that foreign consultants had been engaged to analyse why Pakistan had not been able to get its due share in Chinese imports despite its friendly relations and close proximity.
He suggested that Pakistan should renegotiate the bilateral trade agreement and a meeting was expected in the current or next month. After that, “we would be in a position to decide which strategy is suitable for Pakistan to enhance its share in Chinese imports.”
Responding to a question about a research project on the China-Pakistan agricultural technical cooperation, the agriculture secretary insisted that the Punjab Agriculture Research Board was extending liberal grants to the viable projects planned by the public and private sectors.
“Initially, Rs259 million had been allocated for this purpose. The funding was immediately increased to Rs750 million and it would be further enhanced to Rs3 billion in the next three years,” he said.
He asked the Faisalabad Chamber of Commerce and Industry president to send the project to the research board where a group of experts would review its viability and approve the requisite grant.
https://nation.com.pk/03-Jun-2018/textile-industry-in-pakistan-an-open-example-of-resistance-economy
The textile industry in Pakistan is the largest manufacturing industry in the country and no doubt it is an explicit example of resistance economy.
For years, the textile sector has been the country’s backbone as it provides employment and export revenues.
The textile sector in Pakistan contributes 57% to the country’s exports. The textile industry is the second largest employment sector in Pakistan.
Pakistan is the 8th largest exporter of textile commodities in Asia and textile sector contributes 8.5% to the GDP of Pakistan.
It is pertinent to mention that the exports of textile products posted a growth of 12.8 per cent year-on-year to $4.4 billion in 2017-18.
The total textile sector exports reached $7.72bn value-wise in July-January 2018 versus $7.2bn in the corresponding period of last year, reflecting an increase of 7.18 pc
In the 1950s, textile manufacturing emerged as a central part of Pakistan's industrialization, shortly following independence from the British rule in South Asia. In 1974, the Pakistan government established the Cotton Export Corporation of Pakistan (CEC).
Between 1947 and 2000, the number of textile mills in Pakistan increased from 3 to 600. In the same time spindles increased from 177,000 to 805 million.
Cotton spinning is perhaps the most important segment in the Pakistan textile industry with 521 units installed and operational, says a report by IRNA news agency.
Synthetic fibers prepared with nylon, polyester, acrylic, and polyolefin dominate the market.
Three types of filament yarn are also produced in Pakistan. These are acetate rayon yarn, polyester filament yarn, and nylon filament yarn.
Textile products manufactured from wool are also famous across the country and they include woolen yarn, acrylic yarn, fabrics, shawls, blankets, and carpets.
Artificial silk is also produced in Pakistan. This fiber resembles silk but costs less to produce. There are about 90,000 looms in the country.
There are many famous clothing brands in Pakistan who use locally produced fabrics due to its high quality.
According to consumers the fabric produced in Pakistan is high in quality as compared to fabric produced in other countries.
In recent years, Pakistan has faced competition from regional players including Bangladesh, India and Vietnam.
Pakistan is currently facing a large-scale energy crisis. The government manages the deficit through daily power cuts (or blackouts). These power cuts have significantly impacted manufacturing industries in Pakistan.
One of the most famous apparels brand in the world, Uniqlo is planning to outsource textile garments to Pakistan. Uniqlo will outsource for its 3000 branches worldwide from three Pakistani firms.
The subsidiary of Japanese retail holding company Fast Retailing Inc, Uniqlo Inc has collaborated with three local Pakistan companies aiming to boost the textile exports of the country.
Also read: Pakistan Textile Exports Increased by 8 percent reaches $8.8 billion
Initially, Uniqlo selected five textile companies in Lahore, Faisalabad, and Karachi. Uniqlo representatives were sent to all the companies to assess them and analyze their potential.
An official said, “The initial visit of the Uniqlo team has been successful, which is a big breakthrough.” Three companies were selected by Uniqlo for a joint venture.
Adding, “They still requested for some more companies for shirt fabric and others for circular cutting and sewing.”
For the fiscal year 2017-18, the textile exports of Pakistan increased by almost 9% to $13.53 billion. The textile exports account for almost 60% of total Pakistan’s exports. But compared to the last decade the textile export share of Pakistan in the world market has gone down from 2.2% to 1.7%.
The world’s biggest clothes retailer company Spanish Inditex Group opened its branch office in Pakistan in February. The aim was to double its imports from Pakistan. Other important foreign buying companies in Pakistan include Walmart Global Procurement, Li and Fung Pakistan, JC Penny and others.
Uniqlo is planning to make another trip to Pakistan by end of the month to finalize the deal with the three Pakistani companies.
Uniqlo is a big name in Japan known for providing quality products at affordable rates. The official said, “Therefore, any significant move by Uniqlo into Pakistan for investment and procurement will generate a ripple effect… it will boost textile export. From its factories, Uniqlo supplies apparels to its more than 3,000 sales outlets all across the world.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/21/business/economy/india-economy-trade.html
When Alan Greenspan ran a consulting firm and wanted to know where the economy was headed, he would often look at sales of men’s underwear as a guide.
Mr. Greenspan, who later served as chairman of the Federal Reserve, believed that when times were tough, men would stop replacing worn-out underwear, which no one could see, before cutting other purchases.
By that measure, India is in a serious slump.
“Sales are down 50 percent,” said Jeffrin Moses, gesturing toward the boxes of cotton briefs and tank tops bulging from the shelves of the Tantex undergarment emporium in Tirupur, the southern city where most of the country’s knitwear is made.
It’s not just underwear. Car sales plunged 32 percent in August, the largest drop in two decades, and carmakers are warning of one million layoffs as shoppers balk at rising prices and struggle to get loans from skittish lenders. Macrotech, a big real estate developer that has teamed up with President Trump on a residential tower in Mumbai, just laid off 400 employees as demand for new housing sinks.
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The textile industry, which employs about 45 million people and is India’s second-largest employer after agriculture, is emblematic of the country’s distress.
On an afternoon in early September, Tirupur’s market for wholesale, overstock and slightly defective clothing was deserted. Mr. Moses said that store owners and distributors typically traveled across India to place bulk orders for shirts, pants, dresses and fabric before the country’s September-to-November festival season.
“Now, people do not come,” he said.
The region’s spinning mills, which twirl cotton into yarn, are cutting production. Although the world price of cotton has plunged because of the increased American tariffs on Chinese textiles, owners say that yarn prices have also fallen, making it difficult for mills to profit.
“I haven’t seen a slowdown like this,” said Gaurav Gupta, a son of one of Dollar’s founders, as he walked through the company’s plants. “For a customer who used to buy six pairs of garments, now he has come down to probably four.”
Still, Dollar’s Italian-made cutting machines continue to slice colorful sheets of fabric for undershirts and underpants, six days a week. About 100 workers sort the pieces and tie them into bales, ready for contractors who will sew them into finished garments.
Dollar has not laid off anyone yet, although it has cut work hours — and paychecks — by 10 to 20 percent. Mr. Gupta said his factories were switching to making thermal underwear for northern India’s chilly winters, and he hoped that the festival season would mark the beginning of a turnaround in sales.
Sambhu Karwar, a 22-year-old employee who smooths the fabric before it is cut, said the job was better than working in his family’s bakery in eastern India. Dollar pays him a monthly salary of 12,000 rupees, or about $167, and provides lodging and some subsidized food.
“It’s good living here,” said Mr. Karwar, whose brother also works at the factory.
The outlook is bleaker at Siva Exports, a contractor that stitches some of Dollar’s underwear.
Most of the sewing machines in the two-story factory sit idle. Siva’s owner, V. Murugesan, said he had to lay off about three-quarters of his tailors over the last six months after he lost his two biggest clients — clothing brands in Italy and France. He said he could not match the prices they could get in Bangladesh, where wages are far lower.
measures—the BJP passed a flurry of politically difficult changes.
In a single swoop, it dismantled a longstanding regulatory system that forced farmers to sell most of their crops through government-approved wholesale markets dominated by traders and middlemen instead of directly to consumers or food processors.
Then the BJP passed a series of new labor measures that increased the number of companies that can fire workers without government permission, raised the barriers for workers to unionize, relaxed rules preventing women from working night shifts and restricted unions’ ability to organize strikes. At the same time, it expanded the country’s social security program to include many contract workers.
Jitendra Singh, a minister in the BJP government, said the changes would ultimately improve farmers’ economic prospects, especially in far-flung rural areas, by giving them more options for selling their crops. The BJP has also said it doesn’t intend to phase out government wholesale markets or minimum price supports.
The agricultural industry overhaul went into effect immediately, while most of the labor-market changes will be implemented before the end of the year.
The measures add to a mixed record of economic changes by Mr. Modi and the BJP. The prime minister’s controversial 2016 move to instantly remove almost 90% of the country’s currency in circulation hobbled the economy for years with little benefit to show for it, economists say. Overhauls of the country’s bankruptcy code and the country’s tax system have been broadly applauded, despite complaints about how they have been implemented.
The latest changes have sparked an uproar, including from opposition parties that once promoted the very same policies and even from farmers who are supposed to be the main beneficiaries.
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Economists say the changes could ultimately be a boon for the Indian economy, which depends heavily on agriculture. Farming accounts for about 17% of total income in the country, and provides employment for close to two-thirds of India’s working-age population.
The daunting challenge may be implementing them during a double-barreled economic and health crisis—even though the desperation of the country’s economic state is what finally cleared a political path for an initiative both the BJP and its main opposition have at times supported.
“In a word, all reforms are good in theory,” said Vivek Dehejia, an expert on the Indian economy at Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada. “In practice, I worry it may be too little too late, and I’m not confident that market incentives work well during a time of a public safety emergency.”
If the changes can be maintained long enough for legions of traders and middlemen entrenched by the government-created monopoly wholesale markets to be replaced by competitive markets, then farmers should ultimately benefit by capturing at least some of the profits that have traditionally gone to those buying and reselling their crops, said Shubho Roy, an economist at the University of Chicago who has studied the wholesale market system.
https://www.blogger.com/comment.g?blogID=8278279504304651957&postID=8353606962549198723
Stressing the expansion of corporate farming, Prime Minister Imran Khan on Friday sought proposals from industrialists to modernise agriculture sector and enhance production of various crops.
In a meeting with the country’s leading industrialists and businessmen, the prime minister said national development and prosperity was linked with the development of the business community, facilitation of which was the responsibility of the government.
He said the government had included the industrialists’ proposals in policymaking, which have started producing positive results.
The PM directed the authorities concerned to resolve export-related issues faced by the industrialists at the earliest.
The delegation included Azam Farooq (Cherat Cement), Bashir Ali Muhamamd (Gul Ahmed), Muhammad Ali Taba (Lucky Cement), Saqib Shirazi (Honda Atlas), Fawad Mukhtar (Fatima Fertilizer), Arif Habib (Arif Habib Group Ltd) and Hussain Dawood (Engro Corporation).
Industries & Production Minister Hammad Azhar and Advisers to PM Abdul Razak Dawood, Dr Abdul Hafeez Sheikh and Dr Ishrat Hussain were also present on the occasion.
The delegation thanked the premier for patronizing trade activities in the country. They said the highest level of foreign exchange reserves reflected economic stability and expressed satisfaction over the availability of the government’s economic team for guidance.
The delegation also termed the country surplus current account ‘a welcome sign for national economy’.
They informed the PM that the demand of cement was highest in the country’s history due to promotion of construction activities, which helped generate immense employment opportunities during the pandemic.
https://www.arabnews.com/node/1858791/fashion
Banarsi silk was a luxurious hand-woven fabric once made in the city of Khairpur, in Sindh
No official data exists on the history of the industry and the stories are told by the weavers themselves
SINDH: At the Banarsi Silk Weavers’ Colony in the city of Khairpur, in Sindh, 47-year-old merchant Zafar Abbas Ansari was waiting, hoping for a few additional orders of silk Banarsi saris as Eid Al-Fitr approached.
The sari is a garment native to South Asia, where a long piece of cloth is wrapped elaborately around the body — usually in cotton or silk — and worn with a matching blouse.
Although the city does not make Banarsi any longer — it is now made in Karachi, more than 400 km away — customers still come to the city to purchase the fabric.
Inside the deserted 70-year-old market — once a bustling place — Zafar’s shop is among the last three Banarsi shops left. His family is one of the 40 weaver families who brought the industry to Khairpur when they migrated from India in 1952.
“It is almost two decades since Khairpur stopped producing Banarsi saris after the industry’s collapse. However, even today, the brand is popular among customers. They keep demanding Khairpur’s brand,” Zafar told Arab News.
In its heyday, Khairpur’s Banarsi sari was synonymous with luxury, with vendors supplying the fabric not only locally but also exporting to Pakistani families living in the UK and other European countries.
Inside Zafar’s shop, unstitched pieces of colorful saris — the blouse, the petticoat and main sari fabric — are displayed. The shop shows off different varieties of saris, including the traditional katan — a plain woven fabric with pure silk threads — chiffon, as well as synthetic fabrics.
“Banarsi sari has distinction and standing,” Zafar said proudly. “It is worn by royal families because of its grace and elegance. In some families it is an essential part of the bridal trousseau.”
The price of a sari depends upon its type. The most expensive sari fabric available in the Khairpur market currently is worth Rs45,000 ($300) a piece
Khairpur’s Banarsi Silk Weavers’ Colony is named after the city of Banaras in India (now Varanasi) because of the silk weavers who migrated from there.
There are no official records, and the story of the garment comes from the weavers themselves. They say the history of the Banaras sari industry in Khairpur is linked with Ghulam Saddiquah Begum — the wife of Khairpur state’s then ruler, Mir Ali Murad Khan Talpur of the Talpur dynasty.
Saddiquah Begum herself came from Bahawalpur state, and in 1949, the weavers said, during a visit to India’s Hyderabad Deccan, she offered Mohammed Yusuf Ansari — a sari trader from Banaras — the chance to start manufacturing in Khairpur.
She is said to have offered her state’s support for the establishment of the manufacturing units required.
In 1952, about 40 families of the Ansari clan migrated from Banaras to Khairpur and sari manufacturing began on handlooms. Later, the saris were exported to other countries.
Arab News could not independently verify this information.
According to Anjum Sajjad Ansari, grandson of Muhammad Yusuf Ansari and a representative of the Banarsi Silk Weavers’ Association Khairpur, at its peak there were 400 handlooms in Khairpur. Today, not a single handloom remains.
“At Khairpur’s Banarsi Silk Weavers Colony today there are 16 houses of traditional weavers. However only three are involved in this business of selling Karachi-made fabric,” Anjum said.
Like elsewhere, the Banarsi brand was associated with pure silk thread work. Initially, Khairpur used silk imported from China, but later the silk came from Punjab’s Changa Manga as Pakistan developed hatching silkworms and silk fiber producing factories.
The whole family engaged in the manufacturing process, including silk weaving, dyeing, warping, and reeling. It took between two to three days’ work to complete a single sari.