Combating wheat shortage

ACCORDING to credible reports, wheat output during 2007-08 is again going to fall short of expectations. The most disappointing is the performance of the Punjab province where larger part of the crop is sown and harvested. The latest forecast of the Crop Reporting Wing of the Punjab Agriculture Department places the province’s wheat production at 16.5 million tons or 1.5 million tons less than the target of 18 million tons. Farmers, however, believe that even this lower estimate was “overly optimistic” and the size of the crop could be as low as 14.9 million tons. The Provincial Agriculture Secretary has attributed the shortfall to several adverse factors like reduction in cultivated area because of delayed sugarcane harvesting, shortage of water and decline in the use of DAP fertiliser due to its rising price. Rains were also less than what water managers had hoped for. The agricultural community in general, however, has refused to accept such simplistic explanations. The negative factors were firstly that the government did not announce its procurement price in September, which reduced the commercial viability of the crop for the farmers. The DAP price which was Rs 900 a bag last year soared to Rs 1400 at the start of the sowing season and then to Rs 2900 a bag. While mismanagement factor caused shortage of canal water for irrigation, rural areas were also hit by power outages of about 10 hours a day, making it impossible for farmers to get enough sub-soil water. Some of the farmers sold even the grain usually kept for sowing due to abnormally high prices of wheat, and to make matters worse, the stock of the Punjab Seed Corporation proved to be inadequate. Although nobody could be absolutely certain about the exact size of the crop for FY08 at this stage, the latest indications as stated above are inauspicious. Confusion this year has been compounded by the rain factor.
Timely rains had improved water supply to wheat fields and provided sufficiently low temperature levels, which was expected to have a positive effect on yield, especially at early growth stage, and neutralise the impact of fall in the area under wheat cultivation. The main beneficiary of favourable rain spell were generally believed to be barani areas, where approximately 14.0 percent of wheat is planted. Widespread rains in the recent weeks are, however, reported to have caused some damage to the crop and affected its yield, although its net impact is yet to be assessed. Nonetheless, considering all the facts on the ground, most of the analysts seem to be certain that the country would not be able to produce more than around 21 million tons of wheat during FY08 - about two million tons below the national requirement and three million tons lower than the target of 24 million tons fixed at the beginning of the year. Wheat output during FY07 was also estimated higher at 23.2 million tons. The fall in wheat production, for whatever reasons, is a highly unfavourable development for the country’s economy and its people. As it contributes 14.4 percent to the value added in agriculture and 3.0 percent to GDP, a sizeable reduction in its output would have a significantly negative impact on the growth of the economy and necessitate imports involving huge expenditures in foreign exchange. The prices of food items which are already going through the roof could increase sharply in the coming months and burden further the budget of ordinary households as wheat is the main staple diet of country’s population. Obviously, the government would not like the situation to develop to unmanageable levels and, therefore, must take certain measures on a priority basis.




Muslim Heritage

IN an age when heritage in so many parts of the world is either ignored, Disneyized into theme parks or, worse still, subjected to the destructive onslaught of the bulldozer and the developer, it is encouraging to learn that the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST) and the US Library of Congress plan to digitize all Arab and Muslim scientific records. The information, showing clearly the great achievements of Arab Muslim civilization, will be available free of charge on the Internet through the World Digital Library. This is very significant and important news. One of the aims of the library, to be launched by UNESCO early next year, is the promotion of international and intercultural understanding. Access, at the touch of a mouse, to proof of past Arab scientific prowess will promote just that. For Arabs and Muslims, it will be cause for pride and should help strip away the destructive sense of intellectual inferiority to Western culture that has been such a debilitating element in much of Arab thinking over the past century. For non-Muslims, especially those who through blindness or malevolence continue to regard Muslims as backward and ignorant, it should be an eye-opener and thus do much to improve relations between the two groups
Quite simply, the story of Arab and Muslim scientific excellence centuries ago is not the private property of only Arabs and Muslims. It is one for the entire world, Muslim and non-Muslim, to celebrate. The part played by Arabs and Muslim scientists was momentous and influenced later European science. Some in the West have heard of Ibn Sina and Ibn Rushd under their Europeanized names of Avicenna and Averroes, but how many have heard of Yuhanna ibn Massuwayh and his work on allergy? Or Abu Bakr Muhammad ibn Zakariyya Ar-Razi who wrote the famous Al-Hawi, a 30-volume medical encyclopedia and studied the nature of smallpox 900 years before the Englishman Edward Jenner came up with a vaccine? Or Abdul Qasim Az-Zahrawi who was the father of surgery? How many know that thirteen hundred years ago the first known hospital was established in Damascus and that the first pharmacies appeared in Baghdad shortly after? How many know of the army of scientists and scholars that were there and in Islamic Spain, of their search for knowledge, of the discoveries made, the libraries established? How many know that much of the literature and philosophy of the ancient world was rediscovered in Europe through Arabic translations? That this project is being undertaken by KAUST in collaboration with the US Library of Congress, one of the most important libraries in the world, is both worthwhile and encouraging. This is one of the first projects at KAUST; the university has the lofty aim of inspiring a new age of Arab scientific research and achievement. With this project, looking back to the golden age, one can say with some certainty that it looks set to become a center of excellence not just for Saudi Arabia but for the entire academic world.

—Arab News