Agricultural Development and Environmental Protection: Some Key Issues of Potential Relevance to Pakistan (The Distinguishedl Lecture)

Pakistan has made noteworthy attempts to incorporate environmental concerns into its policy and planning framework. Environment legislation and the establishment of the Pakistan Environment Protection Agency now date back more than a decade. In 1988 it was also one of the first developing countries to begin designing a comprehensive national conservation strategy. Proposed investments and adjustments to policy arising from the strategy are incorporated in the Eighth Plan 1993-98; and continue to be debated in national fora [see Amir, Chaudhri and Nasir (1992) for example]. Such actions reflect the growing concerns on the wide range of environmental problems facing Pakistan, the result of a still rapidly growing population (more than 3 percent per annum) confronting widespread natural resource degradation. The main purpose of this paper, therefore, is not to underline the well known need to take account of the environment in agricultural planning and policy-making in Pakistan, but to raise some general issues regarding the complementarities and trade-offs between maintaining agricultural production growth on one hand and natural resource conservation on the other.