LAHORE, Dec 7: The Kissan Board Pakistan (KBP) will stage a sit-in in front of the Parliament House in January to protest against the ever-increasing prices of agriculture inputs.

Flanked by secretary-general Ibrahim Mughal and the provincial heads of the KBP, President Sadiq Khakwani said here on Sunday that because of high prices of agriculture inputs, the sector was no more financially viable for farmers. Pakistan was the only country in the world with a negative subsidy for the sector.

Contrary to its claims, the government had failed the agriculture sector, he said. During the last one year, the Punjab had missed its production targets for wheat and cotton and was also going to miss those for rice by a big margin. All this happened because of mismanagement. The cumulative cost of this mismanagement was a staggering Rs100 billion, he claimed.

Elaborating on his claim, he said that official targets for cotton had thrice been revised downwards during the last three months. Originally, the government began with 11.5 million bales. Later, the target was revised to 10.5 million and then to 10 million, and now there was talk of nine million bales only. But the actual production will not go beyond a paltry eight million bales. The total cost of 3.5 million bales, which had been lost to pest attack because of mismanagement by the government, was around Rs55 billion.

Similarly, wheat production had also gone down, costing farmers around Rs14 billion. One maund of reduction in the per acre yield cost the nation Rs7 billion, and last year, it went down by two maunds per acre.

Mr Mughal was of the opinion that the country becoming a net importer in two years time of not only essential items like wheat and cotton but also of fruits like grapes and apples, was the most telling evidence of mismanagement of the sector.

The whole sector has not only been exposed to negative subsidy by the government but also to the greed of private sector. There is no check on the multinationals. Nobody checks how much profit they are making at the cost of growers. Pesticides and fertiliser have become the favourite sector for the unbridled multinationals, he lamented. During the last one year, the multinationals had unilaterally increased the prices of pesticides, which were now at least four times more than those being charged by national companies.

The Punjab government, as a policy decision, stopped the national companies from advance-booking pesticides for cotton. This was tantamount to rigging the market in favour of multinationals, which took full advantage of poor farmers by first creating an artificial shortage of drugs and then charging exorbitant prices. All of this happened right under the nose of the government, if not in connivance with it. But no one took notice. The government is not only still persisting with the policy for the next year but is also trying to justify the same.

The government had not been able to check these fleecers because it was itself doing the same in the petroleum sector, he alleged, adding that during the last one year, the price of diesel had gone up from Rs16 to Rs23 per litre while it had experienced a slide in the international market.

In these circumstances, he feared, farmers would not be able to compete internationally under the World Trade Organization (WTO) regime. The government must get farmers’ bodies on board before taking policy decisions, he demanded.

The government, he demanded, should create a better system for marketing agricultural products so that farmers did not suffer at the hands of middlemen and profiteers.