No abstract

Arable farming is an intrinsically risky enterprise. Therefore, managing risks and uncertainties in agriculture is very important as it affects all sectors of the economy of a developing country like Pakistan. To do so, a whole suite of options is available to the farming community to safeguard against any type of risk. However, farmers’ behavior of the concurrent adoption of multiple risk management tools is largely ignored in previous studies and has formed the rationale for this research. Thus, the current study is intended to investigate farmers’ decisions of adopting risk management strategies (contract farming, off-farm income diversification, and farm credit use) and to examine the impacts of a variety of factors on farmers’ risk management decisions. The present study is carried out in four districts of Punjab province, Pakistan with a focus on hybrid maize growers. A multivariate probit model is used to evaluate the impacts of independent variables on growers’ choices of adopting contract farming, off-farm income diversification, and farm credit use to manage farm risks keeping in view the potential for the concurrent adoption of these risk management strategies. Results show that 78% of farmers are risk-averse and hence ready to manage risks. The top risk faced by farmers is price risk followed by biological, climatic, and financial risks. Contract farming is the most popular strategy (61% farmers) followed by off-farm income diversification (49% farmers), and the use of farm credit (42% farmers). The findings also reveal that the decisions of adopting risk management strategies are interlinked while the adoption of one risk management tool complements farmers’ decision to adopt other risk management strategies. In addition, the risk management strategies’ adoption choices are affected by the number of factors including socioeconomic characteristics, farmers’ risk perceptions about risk sources, and their attitude towards risk. The study recommends the provision of timely information (climatic, extension) along with easy access to farm credit and the streamlining of contractual arrangements.

This study is a maiden empirical attempt to examine the long-run linkage between households’ usage of energy and economic progression in Pakistan from the period of 1972–2017. The Autoregressive Distributive Lag (ARDL) bounds testing method to co-integrate is employed to expose the causality dynamics between the variables such as households’ electricity consumption, households’ gas consumption, population growth, and per capita Gross Domestic Product (GDP) in Pakistan. The study adopted three renowned unit root approaches through the use of the Augmented Dickey-Fuller (ADF), the Phillips-Perron (P-P), and Zivot-Andrews (Z&A) tests to check the stationarity of the variables, while the Johansen cointegration technique is also employed to assess the robustness of the long-run association. The validity of outcomes is also checked with casualty and variance decomposition. The estimated results reveal that, in both the short and long run, households’ electricity and gas usage positively affect economic growth, while population growth in the long-run has a negative impact, but the short-run analysis has a positive impact on economic growth in Pakistan. Additionally, the Granger causality and variance decomposition confirm the robustness of outcomes and suggesting a long run association among the variables, and a unidirectional causal link running from three variables to economic growth of Pakistan in the short run.

Callosobruchus spp. are global serious pests of pulses. Therefore, two studies were carried out to determine their distribution in three ecological zones of the Sindh, Pakistan along with their damage potential to major pulses. Survey was conducted from Zone-one (Ghotki, Sukkur and Larkana districts), Zone-two (Hyderabad, Mirpur Khas and Shaheed Benazirabad districts) and Zone-three (Karachi district) during March – April 2020. Grain samples of main pulses i.e., chickpea (channa), field pea (matar), cowpea (lobia), green lentil (moong) and daal channa were collected from three locations of each district and brought to Stored Grain Research Laboratory, Department of Entomology, Faculty of Crop Protection, Sindh Agriculture University, Tandojam for further examination. Three pulse beetle species i.e., C. maculatus, C. chinensis and C. analis were identified from the collected pulse samples as the highest populations of adults, eggs, grubs and pupae was recorded from moong, followed by lobia and gram. No population of pulse beetle was recorded from daal channa and matar. Callosobruchus maculatus was the most dominant species at all sampling as higher beetle populations were recorded from Mirpur Khas and Sukkur districts. Therefore, both these strains were further evaluated for their feeding preference and weight loss assessment on various pulses i.e., gram (chickpea), lobia (cowpea), moong (green gram) and daal channa (yellow lentil) in no-choice under laboratory conditions. C. maculatus showed a significant feeding preference among pulses with lobia and gram being the most preferred, whereas daal channa was the least preferred, hence suffered highest and lowest weight loss, respectively. Therefore, proper storage and quarantine measures are suggested to be taken in the transportation and storage of pulses to restrict the spread and damage of pulse beetles.

C hilli (Capsicum annuum L.) is one of the essential vegetable crops, which is cultivated almost all around the world and cultivated over an area of 1.856 million hectares with a production of 4.626 million tons (Mondal et al., 2012). Nutritionally it is a rich source of vitamin A, C, E, P and contains medicinal properties (Choudhary et al., 2009). The major chilli producing countries are India,