President Alvi emphasises need for a user-friendly crop insurance system to protect the farmers from crop failure
ISLAMABAD, Sep 12 (SABAH): President Dr. Arif Alvi has emphasised the need for a user-friendly crop insurance system to protect the farmers from crop failure and the losses incurred by them due to manmade or natural calamities, especially in the wake of current global-warming-induced super floods in Pakistan. He added that comprehensive measures to prevent the adverse impacts of climate change should be adopted on a priority basis to save the agriculture sector of the country.
President Dr. Arif Alvi gave these remarks while chairing a meeting regarding crop insurance, at Aiwan-e-Sadr on Monday. Senator Dr. Sania Nishtar, Minister for Agriculture Punjab Syed Hussain Jahania Gardezi, Federal Insurance Ombudsman, Dr. Muhammad Khawar Jameel and senior executives of insurance companies attended the meeting.
The President called upon the insurance industry to start a comprehensive nationwide consultation and discussion program involving all stakeholders through seminars and workshops. He added that best practices and successful crop insurance models of regional and international countries should be taken as benchmarks to get inputs for developing a comprehensive market-based and technology-laced self-sustainable crop insurance policy.
He said that collaborations with the agriculture universities of the country should also be developed in holding seminars and workshops and conducting relevant extensive research work in order to help the insurance stakeholders base their policy and products on solid research and authentic database.
The President asked the insurance sector and other stakeholders to particularly focus on 93% of farmers in Pakistan who had land holdings of 12.5 acres or less while introducing their insurance products. He said that farmers’ contributions should be linked, either with crop input or output as deemed appropriate, and the welfare and well-being of the farmers should be ensured. He further stated that in order to encourage farmers to voluntarily opt for crop insurance, the State Bank of Pakistan may advise the banks to increase their portfolio of agriculture loans specifically targeting subsistence farmers, having land holdings of 12.5 acres or less.
The President said that all stakeholders, like banks, insurance companies, and federal and provincial governments, should launch an awareness campaign, by holding seminars, workshops, fairs and road shows, in the target areas and through the launch of advertisement campaigns in the conventional and social media for educating the farmers to voluntarily opt for crop insurance and to protect them from crop failure and destruction of crops during manmade or natural calamities.
The President said that satellite imagery for determining the weather patterns, authentic database, and sophisticated Artificial Intelligence-based technologies should be used to plan insurance products and for giving compensation to the farmers affected by crop failure and destruction of crops. This, he said, would help in creating resilience of farmers against crop failure and crop destruction due to manmade or natural calamities.
The President appreciated the Government of Punjab for launching the Punjab Crop Insurance Programme to provide yield loss protection to the farmers in case of crop failure and crop losses due to calamities and disasters.
The meeting was told that a total of 1.48 million farmers of 27 districts of Punjab were insured against crop failure through a World Bank loan-based pilot program. It was also informed that the contribution of insurance in the country compared to regional and international countries was quite low and needed to be improved.
Meanwhile President Dr. Arif Alvi has urged the need for a close, meaningful and effective collaboration among the federal and provincial governments, local authorities, and public and private sector to promote investment in the mining and minerals sector of the country.
He said this while addressing a meeting of various private and public sector stakeholders relating to the exploration of minerals in Pakistan, at Aiwan-e-Sadr on Monday. Senior officials of the Ministry of Energy (Petroleum Division), Ministry of Commerce, Federal Board of Revenue, and the Government of Gilgit-Baltistan, attended the meeting.
Talking on the occasion, President Dr. Arif Alvi said that Pakistan was bestowed with enormous high-quality mineral resources, like coal, copper, gold, gemstones, silver and rare metals which need to be explored and mined by employing Information-Technology-based modern mining tools and processes to realize the full potential of the mining sector of the country to bring visible change in the socio-economic development of the country.
He said that many parts of Pakistan were rich in minerals, oils, natural gas, rare metals and nuclear substances as well as precious metals, like gold, silver, copper, zinc and many other minerals of industrial use which, if exploited fully by creating state of the art refining and metallurgical processes in the country, could help Pakistan meet the local demand of the industry and would earn precious foreign exchange by exporting value-added mineral and metal products.
The President said that issues relating to licensing for mining processes needed to be evolved, exports of precious metal appliances and withholding taxation policy needed to be targeted for promoting the exploration of this hidden wealth, besides following the international standards and best practices of mining and exploration.
President emphasised the need for using satellite imagery technology and the use of modern mineral detection, analysis and exploration technologies and training of relevant human resources in modern and safe mining methods to make mining processes efficient, effective and safe.
He called upon the stakeholders to conduct workshops and seminars to discuss and review the existing policies and relevant laws, rules and procedures and identify the loopholes and develop a comprehensive set of proposals and recommendations for government to factor in while devising policies for the growth and development of mining and mineral explorations in the country.
The President underlined the need to develop an effective research and development mechanism for exploration, refining and creation of value-added mineral products by looping in relevant universities and research and development departments of the public and private sectors.
He also called for strengthening the capability and effectiveness of border control to stop unlawful exports and import of mineral and metal-based products to protect the local industry.