Diminishing agricultural fertile lands

THERE can be no bigger recipe for disaster for a country like Pakistan, which nature and geography had made ideal for an agriculture-based economy, than the greed-infected diminishing fertile green pastures. This becomes more critical with an uncontrolled population explosion. Pakistan had the capacity to produce enough to feed its population and export surplus. Today, it has been reduced to a country importing all basic essential food items. This is a recipe for disaster, internal unrest, making the country prone to undue pressure from foreign countries, whose financial bailouts have become a regular feature. Coupled with this is institutionalized corruption, as revealed by the Federal Interior Minister about the flight of over $300 billion over the past few years to the Gulf, etc. This poses a threat to our national sovereignty and territorial integrity. Quaid-e-Azam, while addressing the First Constituent Assembly on 11 August 1947, warned that “one of the biggest curses which (British) India is suffering is bribery and corruption. We must put that down with an iron hand. That really is a poison.” He also stated that “black-marketing is another curse.” He suggested that we “have to tackle this monster, which today is a colossal crime against society, in our distressed conditions, when we constantly face shortages of food and other essential commodities of life. A citizen who does black-marketing commits, I think, a greater crime than the biggest and most grievous of crimes. —They undermine the entire system of control and regulation of foodstuffs and essential commodities and cause wholesale starvation and want and even death.” Nature has provided an abundance of fertile lands in Pakistan. Converting fertile green pastures into concrete jungles for housing societies is, as per MAJ, a “grievous crime” because it creates food shortages. We live in times when “drip agriculture systems” have been evolved, which have transformed barren deserts into fertile agric