Role of Advance Agri-Technologies in Reducing the Rural Poverty in Central Punjab, Pakistan

Hazoor Muhammad Sabir and Safdar Hussain Tahir

Abstract

The study was conducted in the Central Punjab for the year 2009-10. The
main objective was to find out some strategies to pick up small farmers from their poverty status. For this purpose, a sample of 300 respondents was taken from districts Jhang, Faisalabad and T.T Singh for final data collection. Seven strategies; enhanced level of urea application to cash crops (S1), the enhanced level of DAP to cash crops (S2), enhanced urea to cash crops plus livestock units (S3), addition of hybrid tomato plus livestock units (S4), enhanced DAP plus livestock units (S5) and addition of cut flowers plus livestock units (S6) were practiced through the LP Model. The objective values obtained through LP model with S1 to S3 strategies indicate that these have reduced the poverty gap up to 48%, 34% and 20%, respectively. While S4 and S5 both were successful but S5’s impact was greater than S4. Through S6 the gap remained only 3.95 percent. Thus, the strategy of addition of short duration crops like hybrid tomato and productive live stock units were the agri-enterprises and their combination can reduce the small farmer’s poverty successfully.