Secretary Agriculture Muhammad Mushtaq Ahmad addresses the Academic Council of UAF

Punjab Agricultural Secretary Mushtaq Ahmad on Tuesday said that agricultural sector was facing many challenges including climate changes, low productivity, water shortage and others. It is must to deal with the situation with combined efforts and enhanced cooperation among agricultural scientists, private-public partnership, and Punjab Agricultural Department. He was talking to teaching staff of University of Agriculture Faisalabad at New Senate. UAF Vice Chancellor Prof Dr Iqrar Ahmad Khan along with all deans and directors was also present on the occasion. He said that a massive project on water sector was being launched with the assistance of World Bank in order to redressing water losses and promoting the modern technique like drip irrigation for meeting the irrigation demands. He said that the UAF expertise is likely to taken for the programme. He also added that the Punjab Government had also kicked off a project on the Improvement of value addition in supply change to approve our product by making them at par with the international market. He said that expertise from the UAF can be taken in the said project. He said that the time had come to bring the absolute green revolution as we are living in different regime and facing various kinds of threats. Green revolution brought some emerging challenges including environmental issues, water scarcity, land degradation and value chain management. He said that now we had work on Absolute Green Revolution for meeting the demand of ever-growing population of the country touching 180 million. Prof Dr Iqrar Ahmad Khan stressed the need to increase investment in the Higher Education as it is witnessing declining trend. Talking about education, he said only six percentage population of our country was having higher education while the ratio in India was 14 percent and in Malaysia 40 percent. He said that currently, the university was running 235 research projects worth Rs 1168 million.