CIAO DATE: 07/2010
February 2010
Center for Strategic and International Studies
In a village near Sheikhupura, Pakistan, Shahid Zia and other elders discuss strategies for coping with steadily declining water levels in the tube wells long used to irrigate their rice crop. They bemoan the rising costs of renting combines to harvest their wheat, made necessary to reduce post-harvest losses from the monsoon that now arrives earlier. Their soils are tired, and their crop yields stagnant. Farmers whose fathers once led the Green Revolution on the moist, rich soils of Pakistan’s Punjab, they must now rehabilitate their soils, restore groundwater, and diversify crops to remain commercially competitive.1 The harvest laborers whose livelihoods these well-educated landowners supported now eke out a living in the slums of Lahore.
Resource link: Agricultural Productivity in Changing Rural Worlds [PDF] - 774K