Muhammad Luqman

Mushroom growth of housing societies and unplanned industrialization is taking its toll on Punjab’s agricultural lands, posing a serious threat to national food security, reports WealthPK.

A few years ago, visitors to Lahore crossing the Ravi River could catch a glimpse of rose nurseries and strawberry fields near Saggian Bridge and Sharqpur Road. However, these lands have now been converted into housing societies. The situation is even worse in other peripheral areas of Lahore like Ferozepur Road and Multan Road.

The upcoming Ravi City, being developed by the Ravi Urban Development Authority (RUDA) along the Ravi River in Lahore and Sheikhupura, is going to eat up thousands more acres of fertile land in the name of urbanization. ”Over the last two decades, the conversion of green lands into urban areas in Punjab has accelerated at an alarming pace.

Lahore and Faisalabad are the worst affected by this ill-planned urbanization,” Dr. Arooj Saeed, Senior GIS Specialist at the Punjab Urban Unit, told WealthPK. Of Lahore district’s total area of 1,790 square kilometers, only 700 square kilometers is cultivated, indicating the extremely high level of agriculture land’s conversion into built-up areas. She said almost all agricultural lands in Lahore and Faisalabad have been turned into urban developments.

The situation in other districts of the province, once known as the food basket of the sub-continent, is getting worse with each passing day. According to the farmers organization Kissan Board Pakistan, housing schemes have so far eaten up 20-30 percent of the fertile land in Punjab. In Lahore alone, 70 percent of agricultural land has been converted into gated housing societies.

According to World Bank data, agriculture contributed 43.2 percent to Pakistan’s GDP in 1960, but this share has declined to 23 percent over the past 65 years, mainly due to shrinking farmland and other anti-farming practices. Moreover, unplanned industrialization on agricultural land, according to experts, is worsening the situation.

Agriculture experts believe the allure of high profits is driving the trend, with real estate developers offering farmers four times the market price for their land. “As farming profits have sharply declined over the years, growers are increasingly inclined to sell their lands to real estate developers at exorbitant prices,” Ebadur Rehman Khan, Director of Farmers Associates Pakistan (FAP), told WealthPK.

He urged the government to take steps to make farming more profitable, discouraging the rising trend of agricultural land sales to real-estate developers. Ebad said the government should consider alternative solutions in the housing sector to mitigate the fast browning of green lands and come up with a comprehensive plan for the development of new cities on barren lands instead of using fertile farmland for housing societies.

“Construction of high-rises in urban areas like Lahore, Rawalpindi and Faisalabad can help reduce pressure on agricultural land. Adopting Singapore’s model as a space-efficient solution could be a viable approach,” Ebad said. The FAP director urged the authorities  to take steps to address the root causes of this problem and ensure a sustainable future for Pakistan's agriculture sector.

Credit: INP-WealthPk