Veteran Kharan politician Mir Abdul Karim Noshirwani has urged the federal and provincial governments to prioritise agriculture as the surest way to tackle unemployment in Balochistan, arguing that peace, development and jobs in the province are bound tightly together.

Noshirwani made the remarks while meeting delegations from Kharan at his residence in Quetta, according to a statement attributed to him. He said the governor and chief minister of Balochistan were taking every possible step for the province's development, and called on the public to play their part in maintaining peace, which he described as the precondition for both prosperity and employment.

Turning to the region's frontier economy, Noshirwani warned that tensions between the United States and Iran would inevitably be felt in Balochistan, whose borders run alongside both Iran and Afghanistan. He called for large trade centres and border markets to be established along these frontiers, particularly the Iranian border, noting that cross-border barter and the movement of everyday goods had long sustained thousands of families in the border districts. That informal trade, he said, had largely dried up, leaving border communities without a source of income.

He linked the loss of livelihoods to a wider social danger, cautioning that when work disappears, disillusioned young people become vulnerable to being drawn into unlawful activity ; a risk, he argued, that made the revival of the local economy a matter of security as much as welfare.

On agriculture, Noshirwani pressed the authorities to extend greater support to farmers, including the timely provision of agricultural loans, so that cultivators could achieve the maximum possible yield. Sustainable employment and the province's prosperity, he said, depended on such measures.

He closed by describing Balochistan as fortunate to have a governor and chief minister who were themselves sons of the province, expressing confidence that they would deliver development and open up avenues of employment.

Noshirwani's appeal comes against a backdrop of concrete movement on the border-trade question. In recent days, Balochistan Chief Minister Sarfraz Bugti and the governor of Iran's Sistan-Baluchestan province agreed to make the existing border markets along the Pakistan-Iran frontier more active and to establish additional ones, explicitly to create employment and ease trade for border communities. Independent labour data, meanwhile, puts youth unemployment in Balochistan at around nine per cent, with informal cross-border commerce long serving as a livelihood for thousands of families in the province's remote frontier belts.

-Balochistan Dispatch