Ahmed Khan Malik

The Sindh government has approved a project in order to strengthen the livestock and aquaculture sectors to make them competitive, sustainable and climate-smart.

The World Bank is the financing partner of the Sindh Livestock Aquaculture Sector Transformation Project. “The project aims to improve the entire supply chain of the livestock and aquaculture sectors and will surely generate immense employment opportunities,” Mumtaz Jamali, Director of the Agriculture Department, told WealthPK. He said the project would improve production and consumption linkages and boost the exportability of livestock and marine products. “The project consists of three components with a total financial outlay of $125 million. The PC-I has been approved by the Central Development Working Party. The project will enter the implementation phase during the current financial year,” he said. Mumtaz noted that the catastrophic floods that hit Pakistan in 2022 were a tragic reminder of the importance of building resilience to such disasters, including by strengthening both social protection and sectors that support economic growth and recovery.

He pointed out that it is also imperative to help the vulnerable absorb climate shocks through innovative climate-smart technology and contingency planning. “The project will finance interventions to promote climate-smart production, value addition, and inclusive access to markets, and help create opportunities for growth in the livestock and aquaculture sectors. These will include improving sector policy and strategic frameworks, as well as evidence-based decision making. It will also contribute to strengthening the capacity of public and private providers to deliver essential knowledge, inputs, and services such as disease surveillance and control, diagnostic laboratory services, breeding programs, food safety, and the development and transfer of green technologies,” said Amjad Zafar Khan, Task Team Leader for the Project.

“The financing will not only assist families in becoming more resilient to climate and economic shocks, but also encourage the use of provincial capacities to take up a larger role in social assistance,” he added. He said the project would cover all districts in Sindh using a phased approach. “It is expected to directly benefit more than 940,000 farm families, including 930,000 livestock households and 10,000 aquaculture producers. The project also includes measures to ensure women farmers’ participation to narrow gender gaps.” “The project will improve the livelihoods of small and medium livestock and aquaculture producers, increase their resilience to animal health and climate-related shocks, strengthen the overall growth of these two sectors in Sindh, and more broadly improve food and nutrition security while reducing the sectors’ contribution to greenhouse gas emissions,” he said.

Credit: INP-WealthPk