By Ijaz Kakakhel

Daily Times  - Leading news resource of Pakistan

Thursday, February 28, 2008

ISLAMABAD: To overcome food shortages in the future Pakistan can use hydroponic farming. Hydroponics can be a futuristic technology for Pakistan to ensure proper supply of vegetable and fruits crops. It uses 70 percent to 90 percent less water than irrigated soil based agriculture. No water was lost in the ground or absorbed by weeds or lost in evaporation, Officials in the ministry of Food, Agriculture and Livestock (MINFAL) told the Daily Times here on Wednesday.

With the collaboration of government, the officials said, a hydroponic pilot project has recently been started in Rawat (Islamabad) under the name BioBlitz over just five acres of land. The state-of-the-art five-acre greenhouse facility is producing hydroponic tomatoes of all varieties including tangy, elegant, cherry and others.

The officials said if the same technology is properly deployed, the country could be a huge power player in the market because nobody else in the region is using high-tech hydroponics.

In the pilot project, a Dutch hydoponic expert was working with the team training Pakistani staff on how to run a hydroponic greenhouse. The project was exactly producing 50,000 kg of tomatoes a week. “If the government built 1,000 acres of greenhouses just for tomatoes, they would get about $500 million of revenue per year only on one crop”, they said.

According to them, a high tech hydroponic facility was more expensive to set up than soil farming but once it is set up, operating and maintenance costs were low and the very high and definite yields means that invested money would be recovered in one year.

Countries, which were world leaders in hydroponics employ what was called a ‘cluster approach’ where land is allocated just for hydroponic farming practiced by different farmers. To develop a viable hydroponics industry, Pakistan desperately needs to improve its infrastructure facilities, such as availability of electricity and land. Greenhouses need a constant supply of power but the situation in Pakistan is not encouraging, they added. The pilot project BioBlitz for instance was running completely on generators.

With more than 16 million population, the officials said Pakistan needed to boost its agriculture performance, which was low and erratic compared to other major agriculture producers. If hydroponics is introduced properly, the country can triple the revenues earned on agriculture exports. The new technology also has a social impact.

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