“Pakistan should formulate a national policy on agricultural mechanization for smallholder farmers”. This was the clear recommendation by participants in a national policy dialogue event on this topic held on 29 May 2024 in Islamabad, led by the Food and Agricultural Organization of the United Nations (FAO), Pakistan and the federal Ministry of National Food Security and Research (MNFS&R).

The low mechanization is one of the key barriers to agricultural growth in the country, which directly impacts the food security situation and impedes the achievement of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

The issue of a low level of farm mechanization among smallholders in Pakistan was addressed by FAO and MNFS&R during 2022–2024, under the project “Developing capacities in agricultural innovation systems: scaling up the Tropical Agriculture Platform Framework” (TAP-AIS), funded by the European Union.

A multistakeholder policy dialogue process was carried out during March–June 2024, led by Dr Yusuf Zafar, Policy Consultant and Former Chairman, Pakistan Agricultural Research Council (PARC), and Dr Muhammad Munir Goraya, Capacity Development Consultant, supported by FAO’s project team: Muhammad Wajid Khan, Project Manager and Junaid Hafeez, Partnership Support officer at FAO-Pakistan.

The process involved analysis of secondary data, interviews with 48 key informant interviews, and insights from two well-attended province-level workshops in Punjab and Sindh. The national policy dialogue event validated the results, leading to an unanimous recommendation that Pakistan should develop a national mechanization policy for smallholder agriculture, followed by strategic planning of its implementation.

This policy and roadmap would spur technical, organizational and policy innovation to strengthen smallholder farmers’ access to relevant agricultural machinery.

As reported in a policy brief launched this week, the proposed national policy should include:

• mechanisms for enhanced collaboration among all stakeholders, especially between various federal ministries and provincial agriculture departments;
• inclusion in the policy of emerging and disruptive technologies, such as precision agriculture, satellite imagery, artificial intelligence (AI), robots, ‘internet    of things’ (IoT), information and communication technology (ICT), etc.;
• development of standards, certification, testing and evaluation regimes for agricultural machinery;
• capacity development of human resource at all levels (engineers, technicians, operators);
• promotion of R&D in agricultural mechanization;
• enabling environment for local manufacturers, including special economic zones, and subsidy and rebate on taxes and duties, in particular of raw materials;
• defining the role of service providers in providing rental services to smallholder farmers of expensive machinery with limited but vital usage;
• increased access to machine repair workshops at village level;
• improved enabling environment for local manufacturing;
• strategies for a major role of the private sector;
• easier access to credit facilities by smallholder farmers for the purchase of farm machinery;
• establishment of a mechanization research centre in Sindh.
• promotion of inclusive development by ensuring that mechanization benefits all farmers, including women and marginalized groups; and
• regional and international collaboration on farm mechanization.

The immediate first step would be to set up a multistakeholder platform or working group on agricultural mechanization for building a national policy. In an informal way, such collaborative platform is already in place, through a dozen organizations that collaborated on the TAP-AIS Pakistan project for the past three years.

Read the policy brief here