Pulses Production in Pakistan: Status, Constraints and Opportunities
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Pulses Production in Pakistan: Status, Constraints and Opportunities Aman Ullah1,3 · Tariq Mahmud Shah2 · Muhammad Farooq1,3 Received: 11 April 2020 / Accepted: 2 July 2020 © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020
Abstract Pulses are smart crops both for humans and the cropping system as they provide protein, minerals, vitamins, and fiber for human diet and nitrogen to the soil and contribute to the maintenance of biodiversity. Pulses, also called grain legumes, contribute about 33% of the global dietary protein requirement of the human population. In Pakistan, the production of pulses is far less than the requirement and the balance is met through imports. The reasons for low production and yield of pulses, in Pakistan, include lack of innovative crop improvement programs and seed distribution system. Currently, about 80% of the pulses are cultivated from the farmers own saved seed. Other major factors responsible for low production and yield are abiotic (drought, heat, salinity) and biotic (weeds, diseases, and insect-pests) stresses, and factors related with soil (marginal lands, alkaline soils with low organic matter and erosion), climate change, lack of crop-specific farm machinery, post-harvest losses and marketing issues. This manuscript discusses the current status, constraints, and opportunities to improve the production of pulses to meet the national requirements. The major opportunities to improve the pulses production includes crop improvement (development of short duration, high yielding, disease resistant and climate resilient varieties), intercropping and growing of pulses as catch crop, adoption of conservation agriculture to conserve the resources, strengthening system of certified seed distribution, provision of crop-specific farm machinery, development and dissemination of site-specific production technologies and seed enhancements. Keywords Pulses · Dietary protein · Nitrogen fixation · Seed enhancement · Conservation agriculture
Introduction Pulses are grain crops from the family Fabaceae. These provide a cheaper source of dietary protein for the masses (Aguilera et al. 2013) and play a significant role in agricultural ecosystems by fixing the nitrogen symbiotically (Siddique et al. 1999; Rubiales and Mikic 2015). Worldwide, legumes occupy 12–15% of arable land to produce 27% of total crop Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (https://doi.org/10.1007/s42106-020-00108-2) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users. * Muhammad Farooq [email protected] 1
Department of Plant Sciences, College of Agricultural and Marine Sciences, Sultan Qaboos University, Al‑Khoud 123, Oman
2
Nuclear Institute for Agriculture and Biology, Jhang Road, Faisalabad, Pakistan
3
Department of Agronomy, University of Agriculture, Faisalabad 38040, Pakistan
production and provide 33% of dietary protein (Mishra et al. 2014). Being a rich source of protein, legumes are a dietary staple for millions of humans and animals. The year 2016 w
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