ISLAMABAD: Pakistan owns one of the world’s largest cattle herds and one of its lowest export scores to show for it. Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif wants that gap closed within a year, and on Wednesday he laid out exactly how.
At a national seminar titled “Harnessing Pakistan’s Livestock Potential,” Sharif inaugurated the Pakistan Animal Identification and Traceability System, calling it the missing piece in a sector that has fertile land, plentiful water and hardworking farmers but keeps losing money it should be earning. Pakistan ranks fourth globally in milk production. It barely registers in dairy and meat exports. Sharif blamed weak disease surveillance, patchy traceability and processing plants stuck decades in the past.
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His plan leans heavily on training people rather than just buying equipment. Another 1,000 agriculture graduates from all four provinces, Gilgit-Baltistan and Azad Jammu and Kashmir will travel to China for advanced instruction, following a first batch that already returned with new farming techniques. Sharif ordered his team to fold everything learned from that group into the next round, and he pushed provincial governments to work in lockstep with Islamabad a tall order given that agriculture became provincial territory under the 18th Constitutional Amendment.
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He backed the plan with cash. The federal government will fully fund development of a homegrown Foot-and-Mouth Disease vaccine, outsourced to a professional operator to guarantee it meets international benchmarks rather than getting stuck at local standards.
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Federal Minister for National Food Security and Research Rana Tanveer Hussain arrived with the numbers that made the room sit up: $14.5 billion in dairy export potential, another $5 billion from meat, both currently left on the table. He credited two years of agricultural reform for building toward this moment, pointed to Chinese institutions now reshaping the Pakistan Agricultural Research Council, and flagged the newly active National Seed Development Authority as another piece falling into place.
Brigadier Ehtesham, chief operating officer of the Green Corporate Livestock Initiative, delivered the seminar’s sharpest reality check. Livestock touches almost every household in Pakistan and generates roughly 14 percent of GDP. The country holds close to 110 million cattle and buffaloes. None of that matters to international buyers, he said, if animal health records don’t exist to back it up. He called for a full policy reset that opens the door to private investment and locks down disease control.
Ahmad Umair, the prime minister’s coordinator on agriculture and food security, went furthest with the numbers: livestock alone drives 60 percent of Pakistan’s agricultural GDP. He said the government will focus on improving each animal through better genetics, scientific breeding and nutrition instead of simply increasing herd sizes. Traceability, easier financing and provinces actually cooperating with Islamabad, he said, will make or break the strategy.
PAITS, built jointly by the FAO and the Punjab Information Technology Board, is designed to solve the traceability problem directly, opening export markets and letting farmers use livestock as loan collateral for the first time. Sharif set the deadline. The sector now has to hit it.
