The Impact of Structural Reforms on Environmental Problems in Agriculture

Abstract

With the technological advancement in almost every sphere of human life, there has been an increased tendency to focus on the conservation of scarce resources by acquiring higher levels of resource use efficiency in the production process. However, there also remains a visible element of haste in policy planning towards the achievement of these goals, particularly in the developing world. The economic viability of such haste would have been positive had this helped in reducing the social cost of delayed policy actions taken in the preceding period. Conversely, the policy planning efforts continue to be ignorant of long-term consequences of current actions, as well as deficient in integrating various components of the sector or sub-sector of the economy which can not be viewed in isolation. These design defects in policies are largely ignored in post-impact evaluations of programmes, and failures are often incorrectly attributed to implementation, or simply referred to as managerial snags. Nevertheless, these inherent design defects become the primary contributors towards non-sustainability of development programmes. Pakistan’s agriculture, with its declining share in the economy over time, is still the single largest sector accounting for 23 percent in the GDP. Whereas its share has steadily declined in favour of rising manufacturing and services sectors, its rate of growth has remained rather erratic.