AVN Correspondent
PESHAWAR: The USAID’s Economic Recovery and Development Activity (ERDA) organized a one-day workshop aimed at enhancing capacity and improving business-to-business networking among agriculture input dealers from various parts of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, including the tribal districts of the former Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA).
The workshop, titled ‘Building Capacities and Creating Partnerships,’ brought together leading national and multinational agriculture input providers to strengthen public-private sector engagement and offer networking opportunities to suppliers of seeds, fertilizers, and pesticides.
In his opening remarks, Shakeel Kakakhel, Deputy Chief of Party at ERDA, pointed out the challenges faced by Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, including shrinking agricultural farm sizes due to population growth and land division among successive generations.
He stressed the need to boost land productivity through the optimal use of high-quality agriculture inputs, advanced farming techniques, and modern technologies.
Representatives of the KP agriculture department attended the workshop, sharing regulatory frameworks, ongoing initiatives, and planned interventions related to the registration, supervision, and facilitation of agriculture inputs providers.
The department’s technical presentations covered standard operating procedures (SOPs) for registering agriculture input providers, innovative practices, and modern technologies to tackle plant protection issues, and measures to minimize environmental and climate impacts from pesticide use.
Speaking at the workshop, Muhammad Naveed Khan, Director Plant Protection at the Directorate General Agriculture Extension, underscored their commitment to supporting agriculture inputs service providers and dealers.
He pledged to enhance quality standards of agricultural inputs and regulate aspects like sales, distribution, manufacturing, standardization, registration, and monitoring of agriculture inputs service dealers and companies.
