Managing Water Resources for Environmentally Sustainable Irrigated Agriculture in Pakistan

Pakistan’s agriculture is almost wholly dependent on irrigation and irrigated land supplies more than 90 percent of agricultural production. Irrigation is central to Pakistan’s economy. Massive investments in irrigation contributed to the development of one of the largest Indus Basin Irrigation System. Despite heavy budgetary inputs in irrigation system, it is facing shortage of resources and suffering from operational problems. The sustainability of irrigated agriculture is threatened due to problems of waterlogging and salinity, inadequate operation and maintenance, insufficient recovery of O&M expenditure, inequitable distribution, environmental degradation, institutional issues etc. The growing scarcity of water sets the future stage for intensive competition over water between agriculture and non-agricultural users. The growing need for food and fibre requirements of increasing population further limits the per capita availability of water. Due to the limited prospects for expanding irrigation facilities, the projected increase in irrigated agriculture will have to come from significant improvement in the performance of existing systems. Policy-makers and planners are of the view that Pakistan’s irrigated agriculture requires new strategies to enhance input efficiency and maintain and improve the quality of the resource base and to get the irrigation system out of crises. There is a global movement for searching a new type of relationship between the managers of irrigated agriculture and farmers. Such options are being considered by government at various levels to put the system on sustainable development path. In addressing the environmentally sustainable water resource management in Pakistan, the paper makes an attempt to provide an over-view of water resource issues and options.

An Economic Analysis of Joint Production Between Latex and Wood Among Rubber Smallholders in Melaka

The total land devoted to rubber crop (Hevea brasiliensis) in 1995 was estimated to be around 1.7 million hectares, which were about 31 percent of the total land under agricultural crops in Malaysia. The increasing demand in the furniture market and the projected shortage of general utility timber from natural forests has made rubberwood a major source of timber. Malaysian Furniture Industry Council estimated about 80 percent of furniture exports were made up of rubberwood, amounting around RM1.7 billion of total 1996 furniture exports from Malaysia. The global demand for natural rubber is also projected to increase from the present figure of approximately 5.9 million tonnes to around 7.5 million tonnes by the early years of the next century. Latex and rubberwood production can be increased significantly by improving the productivity per unit area, which is very low. The present study was therefore conducted with the objective to find out the extent of increase in latex and rubberwood production through reallocation of resources optimally. The study was conducted in Melaka State, confined to the district of Alor Gajah. All the group replanting (TSB) and mini-estate (ME) schemes yielding latex were sampled. The data were collected by the survey method. Personal interview was used. A sample of 31 holdings comprising 18 TSBs and 13 MEs was selected for this study. Thirty-four sample plots were established for tree measurements to estimate rubberwood yield. The study was confined only to smallholders as about 84 percent of the total area planted with rubber in Malaysia come under smallholdings. Data obtained were subjected to statistical analysis. The frontier production function was buih by imposing a Cobb-Douglas type specification on the frontier and an output-based measure of efficiency was evolved. The maximum revenue combination of latex and rubberwood was determined on the production possibility frontier. A comparison of marginal value products of the variable inputs with their corresponding per unit costs exhibited a potential of 24 percent increase in latex and rubberwood production through optimal resource allocation. It was concluded from the study that optimum combination of latex and rubberwood outputs in conjunction with optimal resource allocation and technically efficient management could increase smallholder's income up to 39 percent. It is suggested that Rubber Industry Smallholders Development Authority should declare latex a by-product, tapped only when it could fetch a good price. In developing rubber sma1lholding sector, the Authority should focus on the mini-estate programme rather than any other scheme. Furthermore, it is also suggested that the Authority should launch a programme for the logging of rubber plantations above 19 years, which are uneconomical to maintain

Twists of Elliptic Curves

In this note we extend the theory of twists of elliptic curves as presented in various standard texts for characteristic not equal to two or three to the remaining characteristics. For this, we make explicit use of the correspondence between the twists and the Galois cohomology set $H^1\big(\operatorname{G}_{\overline{K}/K}, \operatorname{Aut}_{\overline{K}}(E)\big)$. The results are illustrated by examples

Multilevel Context Representation for Improving Object Recognition

In this work, we propose the combined usage of low- and high-level blocks of convolutional neural networks (CNNs) for improving object recognition. While recent research focused on either propagating the context from all layers, e.g. ResNet, (including the very low-level layers) or having multiple loss layers (e.g. GoogLeNet), the importance of the features close to the higher layers is ignored. This paper postulates that the use of context closer to the high-level layers provides the scale and translation invariance and works better than using the top layer only. In particular, we extend AlexNet and GoogLeNet by additional connections in the top $n$ layers. In order to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach, we evaluated it on the standard ImageNet task. The relative reduction of the classification error is around 1-2% without affecting the computational cost. Furthermore, we show that this approach is orthogonal to typical test data augmentation techniques, as recently introduced by Szegedy et al. (leading to a runtime reduction of 144 during test time)

Real-Time Document Image Classification using Deep CNN and Extreme Learning Machines

This paper presents an approach for real-time training and testing for document image classification. In production environments, it is crucial to perform accurate and (time-)efficient training. Existing deep learning approaches for classifying documents do not meet these requirements, as they require much time for training and fine-tuning the deep architectures. Motivated from Computer Vision, we propose a two-stage approach. The first stage trains a deep network that works as feature extractor and in the second stage, Extreme Learning Machines (ELMs) are used for classification. The proposed approach outperforms all previously reported structural and deep learning based methods with a final accuracy of 83.24% on Tobacco-3482 dataset, leading to a relative error reduction of 25% when compared to a previous Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) based approach (DeepDocClassifier). More importantly, the training time of the ELM is only 1.176 seconds and the overall prediction time for 2,482 images is 3.066 seconds. As such, this novel approach makes deep learning-based document classification suitable for large-scale real-time applications

Mass transfer efficiency of a tall and low plate free area liquid pulsed sieve-plate extraction column

Acknowledgements The authors would like to acknowledge Chakwal group of industries for funding the project. Ms. Madiha, Ms. Zona, Mr. Sohaib, Mr. Abdullah, Mr. Mudassar, and Mr. Salahuddin also deserve our acknowledgements for their assistance in different ways.Peer reviewedPublisher PD

DETEKSI RESIDU ANTIBIOTIK PADA DAGING BROILER YANG TERDAPAT DI BEBERAPA PASAR TRADISIONAL KABUPATEN PIDIE

DETEKSI RESIDU ANTIBIOTIK PADA DAGING BROILER YANG TERDAPAT DI BEBERAPA PASAR TRADISIONAL KABUPATEN PIDIE ABSTRAK Penelitian ini bertujuan untuk mengetahui adanya residu antibiotik pada daging broiler yang dipasarkan di wilayah kota Sigli. Sampel yang digunakan dalam penelitian ini adalah ayam pedaging (Broiler) bagian paha dan dada yang terdapat di empat pasar dalam wilayah kota Sigli yaitu pasar kota Sigli, pasar Beureunuen, pasar Tidjue dan pasar kembang Tanjong. Pengujian sampel terhadap residu antibiotik dilakukan dengan metode Bioassay (Screening) di laboratorium kesmavet Fakultas Kedokteran Hewan Universitas Syiah Kuala dengan Bacillussubtillis sebagai strain bakteri yang direferensi, masing-masing sampel dikerjakan pengulangan 3 (tiga) kali. Hasil pengujian menunjukkan hasil negatif disemua pasar yang diperiksa. Tidak ditemukan residu antibiotik di beberapa pasar tradisional kabupaten Pidie

ANALISIS KETERSEDIAAN LAHAN UNTUK PEMENUHAN KEBUTUHAN SEREALIA DI KABUPATEN ACEH JAYA

Abstrak. Komoditi serealia sangat penting dalam memenuhi kebutuhan pangan masyarakat sebagai sumber karbohidrat utama. Produksi serealia salah satunya ditentukan oleh ketersediaan lahan pertanian yang luas dan subur. Kabupaten Aceh Jaya memiliki potensi untuk pengembangan tanaman serealia khususnya padi dan jagung. Semakin besar jumlah penduduk maka kebutuhan terhadap serealia juga akan semakin besar. Kebutuhan serealia dihitung menurut kebutuhan energi penduduk yang terus bertambah setiap tahun, serta mengetahui ketersediaan lahan yang sesuai untuk tanaman serealia berdasarkan kriteria tumbuh dan rencana tata ruang wilayah di Kabupaten Aceh Jaya). Hasil analisa menunjukkan jumlah penduduk di Kabupaten Aceh Jaya pada Tahun 2006 yang berjumlah 86.396 jiwa akan terus bertambah hingga Tahun 2030 berjumlah 115.359 jiwa. Produksi serealia (padi dan jagung) pada Tahun 2015 padi sebanyak 80.170 ton dan produksi jagung sebanyak 4.892 ton hingga pada Tahun 2030 produksi padi menjadi 1.161.329 ton dan produksi jagung menjadi 672.558,80 ton. Ketersediaan energi rata-rata dari produksi serealia di Kabupaten Aceh Jaya pada Tahun 2006-2015 masih surplus dengan rata-rata ketersediaan energi 69.328,53 juta/kkal sedangkan rata-rata kebutuhan energi penduduk sebesar 36.899,23 juta/Kkal. Ketersediaan lahan untuk budidaya tanaman serealia di Kabupaten Aceh Jaya seluas 19.119 ha telah mencukupi kebutuhan lahan untuk pemenuhan kebutuhan serealia yaitu seluas 4.402,87 ha. Ketersediaan lahan potensial yang sesuai untuk budidaya serealia di Kabupaten Aceh Jaya seluas 66.400,39 ha dapat mencukupi kebutuhan lahan untuk pemenuhan kebutuhan serealia penduduk hingga Tahun 2030 seluas 5.102,97 ha