The Book “Oasis Agriculture in Pakistan’ comprising Folk tales of Agro-Pastoral Heritages, Transformation and Biodiversity written by Prof Dr Andreas Burkert from University of Kessel Germany was launched at ceremony at the University of Agriculture Faisalabad.

FAISALABAD May 23: The Book “Oasis Agriculture in Pakistan’ comprising Folk tales of Agro-Pastoral Heritages, Transformation and Biodiversity written by Prof Dr Andreas Burkert from University of Kessel Germany was launched at ceremony at the University of Agriculture Faisalabad. Prof Dr Andreas Burkert dedicated the book to Prof Dr Iqrar Ahmad Khan, the PHEC Chairman and former Vice Chancellor UAF and paid special thanks to Prof Dr Zulfiqar Ali, the Vice Chancellor of UAF and Prof Dr Asif Ali, the Vice Chancellor of Muhammad Nawaz Shareef University of Agriculture, Multan for their continuous support in this regard. Dr Andreas Burkert, talking about the book said that in this volume results of 15 years of collaborative agricultural research on plant biodiversity and agro-pastoral land use management in Pakistan’s deserts of the Karakoram Mountains and the low lands of Cholistan are complemented by a collection of 169 folk tales from oases of the same areas that encode human-nature relationships. Rather than aiming at a comprehensive review of the vast plant and animal diversity in Pakistan or its millennia old cultural heritage, this volume focuses on plant biodiversity and land use management in Pakistani oases undergoing major regime shifts in the country’s social ecological settings. In Gilgit-Baltistan, during the last decades, increasing market orientation and globalization were driven by the building of the Karakoram Highway in 1975. Cholistan’s transformation, in contrast, is more recent as there the Green Revolution was only jumpstarted in the mid 2020s by foreign investment in intensified, irrigated agriculture replacing widespread Toba-based pastoralism. He said that a decade ago with conservation with Dr Iqrar Ahmad Khan, we set a mission is to bring up the people of Pakistan—both those in the academic environment as well as the people in the countryside, those who have no voice—to lift them up and decided to write the book.