scholarly journals Pakistan's Agriculture in the 21st Century

1998 ◽  
Vol 37 (4II) ◽  
pp. 245-256
Author(s):  
Rashid Faruqee

In Pakistan, agriculture, which accounts for more than 20 percent of GDP and provides more than 50 percent of jobs, has a special role to play in growth, poverty reduction, and environmental protectiOl'. Agricultural growth in the past thirty years has been impressive, at more than 3 percent a year. Sources of growth, however, have changed over the years-from the seed, fertiliser, and irrigation package of the 1960s, to intensification of water and fertiliser use in the 1970s, to improvements in crop management and incentives in the 1980s. Those sources of growth have all but run their course, and agriculture growth in the next century will depend on increasing productivity. At present there are clear signs of stagnation in productivity growth. In fact, total factor productivity, a good measure of overall productivity, may even have declined since the mid-1970s due to resource degradation, failure to adapt technical change, and poor incentives, among others causes. Future growth through productivity increase, however, will require major changes in systems, policies, and institutions for agriculture. These changes are crucial because agriculture in the next century will continue to be key in achieving growth with poverty alleviation and environmental protection.

2008 ◽  
Vol 13 (Special Edition) ◽  
pp. 189-204 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sohail Jehangir Malik

The structural transformation of Pakistan’s economy has not been accompanied by a concomitant decline in the proportion of labor employed in agriculture. While this transformation has resulted in a non-farm sector that is large and growing it has not lead to the rapid absorption of the pool of relatively low productivity labor away from the agriculture sector, as predicted by conventional development theory embodied in the models of the 1960s. Despite the obvious importance of the role of a vibrant rural non-farm economy (RNFE), and in particular, a vibrant non-farm services sector to address the challenges of poverty, food security, agricultural growth and rural development, this sector has received inadequate attention in the debate in Pakistan. Based on a review of literature and data from two large surveys – the Rural Investment Climate Survey of Pakistan 2005 and the Surveys of Domestic Commerce 2007 – this paper attempts to analyze the factors underlying the low level of development of the rural non farm economy and the potential role it can play in Pakistan’s economic development.


1996 ◽  
Vol 35 (4I) ◽  
pp. 399-417 ◽  
Author(s):  
John W. Mellor

The right to the flow of income from water is vigorously pursued, protected, and fought over in any arid part of the world. Pakistan is of course no exception. Reform of irrigation institutions necessarily changes the rights to water, whether it be those of farmers, government, or government functionaries. Those perceived rights may be explicit and broadly accepted, or simply takings that are not even considered legitimate. Nevertheless they will be fought over. Pakistan has a long history of proposals for irrigation reform, little or none being implemented, except as isolated pilot projects. Thus, to propose major changes in irrigation institutions must be clearly shown to have major benefits to justify the hard battles that must be fought and the goodwill of those who might win those battles for reform. Proponents of irrigation institution reform have always argued the necessity of the reforms and the large gains to be achieved. Perhaps, however, those arguments have not been convincing. This paper will briefly outline the failed attempts at irrigation reform to provide an element of reality to the discussion. It will then proceed to make the case of the urgency of reform in a somewhat different manner to the past. Finally, current major reform proposals will be presented. This paper approaches justification of irrigation reform by focusing on the agricultural growth rate. It does so because that is the critical variable influencing poverty rates and is a significant determinant of over-all economic growth rates. The paper decomposes growth rates and suggests a residual effect of deterioration of the irrigation system that is large and calls for policy and institutional reform. The data are notional, suggesting the usefulness of the approach and paves the way for more detailed empirical analysis and enquiry for the future.


Author(s):  
П. В. Капустин ◽  
А. И. Гаврилов

Состояние проблемы. Проблематика городской среды заявила о себе в 1960-е годы как протест против модернистских методов урбанизма и других видов проектирования. Средовое движение не случайно тогда именовали «антипрофессиональным» - оно было направлено против устоявшихся и недейственных методов работы с городом - от исследования до управления. За прошедшие десятилетия в рамках самого средового движения и его идейных наследников наработано немало методов и приемов работы, однако они до сих не подвергались анализу как пребывающая в исторической динамике целостная совокупность инструментария, альтернативного традиционному градостроительству. Результаты. Рассмотрены особенности и проблемы анализа методологического «арсенала» средового движения и урбанистики. Методы работы с городской средой впервые структурированы по типам знания. Показана близость методов исследовательского и проектного подходов в отношении городской среды. Выводы. В ближайшее время можно ожидать появления новых синтетических знаний и частных методологий, связанных как с обострением средовой проблематики, с расширением круга средовых акторов, так и с процессом профессионализации урбанистики. Statement of the problem. The urban environment paradigm emerged in the 1960s as a protest against the modernist methods of urbanism and other types of design. It was no coincidence that the environmental movement was back then called "anti-professional" as it was directed against the established and ineffective methods of working with the city, i. e., from research to management. Over the past decades, within the framework of the environmental movement and its ideological heirs, a lot of methods and have been developed. However, they have not yet been analyzed as an integral set of tools in the historical dynamics which is an alternative to traditional urban planning. Results. The features and problems of the analysis of the methodological “arsenal” of environmental movement and urban studies are considered. The methods of working with the urban environment are first structured according to the types of knowledge. The proximity of research and design approaches in the case when the urban environment is dealt with is shown. Conclusions. In the nearest future, we can expect new synthetic knowledge and particular methodologies related to both the exacerbation of environmental problems to emerge as well as the expansion of the circle of environmental actors and the process of professionalization of urbanstics.


Author(s):  
Elwira Sienkiewicz ◽  
Michał Gąsiorowski ◽  
Ladislav Hamerlík ◽  
Peter Bitušík ◽  
Joanna Stańczak

AbstractLakes located in the Polish and Slovak parts of the Tatra Mountains were included in the Tatra diatom database (POL_SLOV training set). The relationship between the diatoms and the water chemistry in the surface sediments of 33 lakes was the basis for the statistical and numerical techniques for quantitative pH reconstruction. The reconstruction of the past water pH was performed using the alpine (AL:PE) and POL_SLOV training sets to compare the reliability of the databases for the Tatra lakes. The results showed that the POL_SLOV training set had better statistical parameters (R2 higher by 0.16, RMSE and max. bias lower by 0.2 and 0.36, respectively) compared to the AL:PE training set. The better performance of the POL_SLOV training set is particularly visible in the case of Przedni Staw Polski where the curve of the inferred water pH shows an opposite trend for the period from the 1960s to 1990 compared to that based on the AL:PE dataset. The reliability of the inferred pH was confirmed by the comparison with current instrumental measurements.


2021 ◽  
Vol 54 (1) ◽  
pp. 21-33
Author(s):  
Julie Berg ◽  
Clifford Shearing

The 40th Anniversary Edition of Taylor, Walton and Young’s New Criminology, published in 2013, opened with these words: ‘The New Criminology was written at a particular time and place, it was a product of 1968 and its aftermath; a world turned upside down’. We are at a similar moment today. Several developments have been, and are turning, our 21st century world upside down. Among the most profound has been the emergence of a new earth, that the ‘Anthropocene’ references, and ‘cyberspace’, a term first used in the 1960s, which James Lovelock has recently termed a ‘Novacene’, a world that includes both human and artificial intelligences. We live today on an earth that is proving to be very different to the Holocene earth, our home for the past 12,000 years. To appreciate the Novacene one need only think of our ‘smart’ phones. This world constitutes a novel domain of existence that Castells has conceived of as a terrain of ‘material arrangements that allow for simultaneity of social practices without territorial contiguity’ – a world of sprawling material infrastructures, that has enabled a ‘space of flows’, through which massive amounts of information travel. Like the Anthropocene, the Novacene has brought with it novel ‘harmscapes’, for example, attacks on energy systems. In this paper, we consider how criminology has responded to these harmscapes brought on by these new worlds. We identify ‘lines of flight’ that are emerging, as these challenges are being met by criminological thinkers who are developing the conceptual trajectories that are shaping 21st century criminologies.


2021 ◽  
pp. 1-8
Author(s):  
Edith Brown Weiss

Today, it is evident that we are part of a planetary trust. Conserving our planet represents a public good, global as well as local. The threats to future generations resulting from human activities make applying the normative framework of a planetary trust even more urgent than in the past decades. Initially, the planetary trust focused primarily on threats to the natural system of our human environment such as pollution and natural resource degradation, and on threats to cultural heritage. Now, we face a higher threat of nuclear war, cyber wars, and threats from gene drivers that can cause inheritable changes to genes, potential threats from other new technologies such as artificial intelligence, and possible pandemics. In this context, it is proposed that in the kaleidoscopic world, we must engage all the actors to cooperate with the shared goal of caring for and maintaining planet Earth in trust for present and future generations.


2002 ◽  
Vol 18 (2) ◽  
pp. 351-362
Author(s):  
Pablo A. J. Brescia ◽  
Scott M. Bennett

This interview with Mexican writer David Toscana ponders the current state of both Mexican and Latin American narrative and serves as an insight into his own works. Toscana's statements about the recurring themes in his narrative (failure, loneliness, characters put to the test, and a tendency to play with different time frames, especially in his novels) help illustrate some of the characteristics of his fiction, which, according to various critics, is one of the most promising today in Mexico. Also noteworthy are his comments about the tendency of writers from his generation (born in the 1960s and later) to reject the legacy of the "boom" writers. Toscana's own interest is to revisit history and tradition by constructing a different voice and a different vision, a new way of seeing and hearing both the past and the present. Esta entrevista con el escritor mexicano David Toscana trata de explorar el estado actual de la narrativa mexicana y latinoamericana, améén de servir como una aproximacióón a la incipiente obra de este autor. Las respuestas de Toscana sobre los temas recurrentes en su literatura (el fracaso, la soledad, los personajes sometidos a pruebas y una tendencia a proponer diferentes marcos temporales, especialmente en sus novelas) subrayan algunos rasgos de su ficcióón, la cual, segúún la críítica especializada, es una de las máás prometedoras en el panorama mexicano de hoy. De especial interéés son los comentarios de Toscana sobre la tendencia de los escritores de su generacióón a rechazar el legado del "boom" latinoamericano. Toscana reacciona contra ese rechazo y propone una voz personal que vuelva a la historia y a la tradicióón y plantee una nueva manera de ver el pasado y el presente de Mééxico.


2017 ◽  
Vol 31 (2) ◽  
pp. 125-144 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joshua D. Angrist ◽  
Jörn-Steffen Pischke

The past half-century has seen economic research become increasingly empirical, while the nature of empirical economic research has also changed. In the 1960s and 1970s, an empirical economist's typical mission was to “explain” economic variables like wages or GDP growth. Applied econometrics has since evolved to prioritize the estimation of specific causal effects and empirical policy analysis over general models of outcome determination. Yet econometric instruction remains mostly abstract, focusing on the search for “true models” and technical concerns associated with classical regression assumptions. Questions of research design and causality still take a back seat in the classroom, in spite of having risen to the top of the modern empirical agenda. This essay traces the divergent development of econometric teaching and empirical practice, arguing for a pedagogical paradigm shift.


1989 ◽  
pp. 93
Author(s):  
Sara Dunn ◽  
Sheila Rowbotham
Keyword(s):  
The Past ◽  

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document