On January 8, the Rising Nepal published an opinion piece questioning Nepal’s failure to export citrus to China, after a similar failure to export honey to Europe. These are not isolated incidents—there are often disputes with India and other countries regarding the trade of agricultural commodities. In the citrus case, it was stated that Nepal was unable to fulfill China’s phytosanitary criteria for imports. This is the case with other commodities and countries also.

Importing agriculture

Despite the fact that agriculture is the country’s primary industry, almost all of our agricultural products are imported. Export is still in limited quantity and the trade deficit is escalating. Nepal’s economy is highly dependent on agriculture, as it contributes 35 percent to the GDP and around 70 percent of families still embrace agriculture as their primary occupation. But these farm families do not even grow enough staples to feed their own family, and rest of the population relies on imported products. In contrast, in the developed world, even though only five percent of the population is engaged in agriculture, they are still able to feed their population and export surplus quantities to foreign countries.

Nepali farmers seem to be producing a variety of agricultural products. It is not that agriculture is new to us. But despite the fact that Nepalis have been farmers for generations, we lag behind the rest of the world when it comes to agriculture. There are a host of reasons supplied to explain this phenomena, including the agriculture regime of the government, a disinterest among the youth to work in the fields, and a lack of technical and mechanical input.

The government’s planning documents and reports make it evident that agriculture is accorded the highest priority. Huge amounts of money have been spent and numerous NGOs are eagerly working to change the facade of this sector. The problem, however, is that such plans lack proper design, implementation, and review of the goals set every fiscal year. In addition, the government has not yet taken the initiative to train farmers to commercialise their agricultural products, provide subsidies, tax incentives, and deductions to attract people towards agriculture as their primary business. NGOs seem to be dishonest as well, since they seem to be spending most of their budget on projects that only yield documents.

What Nepal needs to do is make agriculture conducive to commercialisation and export to the international market. One of the major facets that we need to focus on is plant protection, simply sowing the seeds will not produce the expected quality yield. In addition, Nepal is rich in natural resources with a diversified climate, but sadly, we still have not been able to harness this to benefit our impoverished population. The gamut of temperatures, ranging from 0 to 45 degrees Celsius, implies that we can grow almost anything year round, along with the required human resource that resides in almost every belt. The only thing we lack is pragmatic planning, design, implementation, and review.

International standards

Nepal is a signatory to the International Plant Protection Convention (IPPC), which is a treaty affiliated to the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations. It was established in 1952, overruling all previous international agreements on plant protection, and aims to coordinate among member countries to prevent the spread of notorious diseases and insects through agricultural products, packaging materials, carrying vehicles, handlers etc. Member countries are bound to follow the IPPC’s rules and regulations. So even if Nepal’s produces surplus amounts of agricultural products, we cannot export it if we fail to meet import criteria of the destination country.

IPPC deals not only with insects and pests that accompany export or import commodities, but also with the way we protect our crops from pests during production. Such measures are called phytosanitary measures. For example, if we want to export lentils to Bangladesh, they need to be free of any disease or pests that are not present in Bangladesh. To avoid such risks and to make the trade of agriculture goods easier, IPPC has set common standards to fulfill before export or import of agricultural goods. These are called International Standards on Phytosanitary Measures (ISPMs), which are measured in each signatory country through the National Plant Protection Organization (NPPO). NPPO also provides technical and legal advice to the government concerning its standards.

While elsewhere the NPPO is an umbrella organisation of all plant protection organisations working within the country, in Nepal, it is like a sub-section of the Plant Protection Directorate (PPD) and has been relegated to one small room in the PPD building. Thus far, IPPC has endorsed 36 ISPMs to regulate the international movement of notorious pests and diseases. Each signatory country has the obligation to adopt these ISPMs and formulate their own sanitary and phytosanitary (SPS) measures remaining within the framework of these ISPMs.

Unfortunately, Nepal has not officially endorsed a single SPS measure till date. Feeble efforts were made in the past but there have been no substantial results. Similarly, we still do not have an updated list of pests that we need to quarantine. The previous Plant Protection Act 1973 was replaced with a new Act in 2007 but the list of quarantine pests remains the same. Pest species and populations change very rapidly and we have to be more cautious and vigilant if we wish to compete in the international market.

Coming back to Nepal’s failure to export citrus and honey, the primary reason our products are not being accepted in the international market is that we have not been able to fulfill the receiving country’s phytosanitary requirements. Therefore, it is time to focus on improving the standards of our products by following international guidelines, rules, and regulations.

Sharma is pursuing a Ph.D at the Department of Plant Pathology, National Chung Hsing University, Taiwan ([email protected])