USE OF LAND, LABOUR AND IRRIGATION WATER IN PAKISTAN’S AGRICULTURE: SOME ECO-MANAGERIAL ISSUES

To study the resource allocating behavior of Pakistani farmers for land, labor and irrigation water, Linear Programming (LP) analytic technique was applied using data from 1990-2005 for 13 major Kharif and 7 Rabi crops on national level. These crops have been occupying 80 - 85 percent of Pakistan’s cropped area for the last three to four decades. The application of LP analysis resulted in bringing three major natural resource management issues of the Pakistan’s crop sector to the forefront. First, results implied that, for the system to run efficiently, the sub-optimal crops would have to be replaced with optimal ones. Second, cotton and tomato appeared to be more sensitive to labor availability relative to other crops; showing a direct correlation between the crop optimality and labor availability. And third, irrigation water emerged as a critical input for IRRI rice in Kharif and for potato and gram in Rabi season showing direct correlation between number of irrigations applied and optimality of these crops. In contrast, irrigation water showed less sensitivity in the revenue generation of cotton, tomato, wheat and berseem relative to its role as costly input. This implied that there is scope for efficient management of irrigation water in the latter four crops (cotton, tomato, wheat berseem). However, in the former three crops (IRRI rice, potato gram), use of extra water would help in revenue generation