 The Honourable Director-General of the FAO, the Honourable Prime Minister of Bhutan, Honourable Ministers of member's nation-states from the 35th Asia-Pacific Regional Conference of FAO. Excellencies, ladies and gentlemen, Pakistan with a population of 220 million has nearly 19% of its GDP generated through the agriculture sector. We are trying that those people living below the poverty line in particular are sustained in these difficult times of COVID-19. We had an attack of the locust recently. We've also had adverse weather conditions at the time of harvest of our wheat. We are short by about one and a half million tons this year. So we are going to import wheat so that we have availability to those who require nutrition from wheat. And we are hoping that our country will be able to meet all the challenges, whether it's of climate change, whether it's of locust, whether it's of COVID-19. Our agricultural growth rate was about 2.7 to 2.8%, where it should have been about 3.5% partially on account of COVID-19. But by and large, the agriculture sector has done better than the other sectors of our economy. And the Government of Pakistan and the Prime Minister for Mr. Brown Khan has been able to bring about certain transformational changes in policy where we would be promoting our five major components. We need to upgrade our research, our extension, our education systems of agriculture, whereby we can meet our objectives, our targets of transforming through more investment in the human resource through quality education, through better health facilities. And when we generate more in our economic activity, employment opportunities would rise up. We would like to digitalize a fair amount of our agro technologies so that we can map out the soil conditions and we can bring about better quality. And we need to upgrade our seed technology in particular, make our inputs of chemicals and other, and to carry out the best practices, as I carried out in the more advanced countries of the world. Overall, our strategic objective would be to raise our productivity per hectare and have surpluses rather than deficits, as we have done this time with wheat. And it can only happen when policies are framed which will benefit and bring about the income for the farming community. Unfortunately, in the past, more thrust has been to promote the commercial, industrial sectors at the cost of the agriculture sector. We want to bring about a better balance between our different sectors of the economy, manufacturing, agriculture, and the service sectors. Thank you.