ECONOMY: The Missing Entrepreneur of Sindh

Fishermen pictured along the coast of Sindh: despite an abundance of agricultural produce, fisheries and traditional crafts, Sindh’s potential has not resulted in local businesses that could create jobs beyond agriculture | AFP During a recent visit to Borneo island in the Malay archipelago, I came across a shrimp farm on the coast of the rainforest-covered island, run by a Chinese woman entrepreneur. Using a seawater reservoir behind a mangrove forest, she had built a business exporting shrimp around the world. My mind drifted home to Pakistan’s 1,058-kilometre coastline, along Sindh and Balochistan. Why, I wondered, do we see so little aquaculture of this kind? I was reminded of a conversation I had with the owner of a hatchery recently established in Gharo in Sindh.

He told me that one of his biggest worries was transporting the hatchlings quickly and safely to fish and shrimp farms in Muzaffargarh, Punjab. The irony struck me. The hatchery is in coastal Sindh, close to the sea and the Indus delta, yet its young fish and shrimp have to travel hundreds of kilometres inland to find farms. I asked him why people were not investing in fish and shrimp farming in Sindh? He did not have a clear answer, except to say that there were not enough investors and the business climate is also not supportive. But the lack of investors is not really an explanation. It is itself a question. The problem in rural Sindh may not be a lack of capital, but its concentration — and the failure to create the conditions in which small businesses can grow into industries Sindh has fertile land, a long coastline and a river, alongside abundant agricultural produce, livestock, fisheries and traditional crafts. Yet much of this potential has not translated into local processing, packaging and…